By Chris Hewett
You could set the clocks by it. Whenever the Walcot Old Boys team bus began one of its regular 45-mile descents from the sunlit uplands of Bath into some dark and dangerous corner of Gloucester – aka “the bottom circle of hell” – at least one trepidatious player would be heard muttering: “It’s a bloody long way to go, just to be beaten up.”
And it was even further coming back, if you came back at all, because the nearest A and E was invariably in the opposite direction.
By this measure, common humanity demands that we sympathise with those poor South Africans unfortunate enou...