This subject dropped out of the press pretty quickly. But I thought I'd make a general point about how rugby is taught.
I went to a school that was obsessed with rugby. Well, the establishment and a small section of the parents were. Most of us were interested in football and a few were into RL- I grew up in a resolutely football-obsessed suburb and I don't think I'd even held a rugby ball when I went to secondary school, and I distinctly remember wondering what sport the "First XV" must be. So when we got to try it out, it was a bit of novelty for a lot of us, as no more than 30 out of about 200 lads had ever played before.
Unfortunately, the novelty wore off pretty quickly when you realised that it wasn't taught as something to try, it was something you were going to do and you were going to "enjoy" it no matter how much you didn't. The first XV and those who sometimes made up a second XV peeled off to play rugby in almost every games lesson, whilst we did two four-week blocks of it. And it was most definitely taught not as an introduction to the game. I remember in probably the first session I ever had, we played touch. I was on the ball, and had just passed, when I was shoulder-charged off the ball and flattened by a lad who normally played in the second XV, who with his crony did the same to a load of the others. Response from the teacher? Character-building! Not that you've t***ted beginners and cheated in a game of touch, but that we should suck it up. After that, it was basically three years of disillusioned or uninterested boys who increasingly resented the game putting in minimum effort, being ranted at by teachers who couldn't understand why we weren't demonstrating an assumed love of rugby, punctuated by more incidents of being smashed by those drifting in and out of the second XV. There was nothing in the way of learning to tackle, scrum, lineout, anything. On top of that was the constant insistence that we had to enjoy it and that it was character-building, which even extended to the parents- my old man got a call from a rugby parent he didn't know, who'd been given a list of parents, and asked why he wasn't volunteering to help serve tea for the First XV!
That all put me off rugby (even watching) for years afterwards, and plenty of my mates still loathe it now even if they remain sporty. I've just got back into playing it after fifteen years- but how many lads and men have been, and are, put off by lazy, unimaginative coaching that sees rugby not as something to enjoy but as some kind of social experiment or lesson in morality? They're lost to the game sometimes for good. I hope attitudes have changed.
Rugby might be a game for all shapes and sizes, but it needs to be coached like that or it is meaningless.