We are critically dissecting Saturdays World Cup final defeat in the pub.  It is just minutes since the final whistle.

“It’s a stupid game anyway.” I point out.

“It didn’t seem stupid all those years ago when William Webb Ellis picked the ball up at Rugby school and ran with it.”

“Well, clearly William Webb Ellis didn’t go to a Comprehensive.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you picked the ball up and ran with it at my school, it would almost certainly have resulted in a severe shoeing from about twenty other kids.”

“But he invented a new game when he did it.”

“No, he cheated. You can’t invent new rules halfway through a game. That’s not how it works.  I bet he was the fat kid who was rubbish at football, and he probably wanted to invent a game he might be good at. Pie-eating had probably already been invented, so picking up the ball and running into other people with it in hand was his next best option.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Yes it was. The story isn’t that William Webb Ellis called a school meeting and spent an hour at the overhead projector outlining his plans for a new game with an egg shaped ball. It was that he picked up the ball during an existing game of football. In fact he probably gave away a penalty, and I’ll bet his team mates fucking hated him. You do realise, if he hadn’t cheated, we wouldn’t be sat here being miserable right now.”

“True. The cheating little fucker.”

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