View From The Stands

Hiya Sports fans in the West Midlands!

You may have realised by now that Sports Radio Birmingham have let me loose on the airwaves with my new interactive  Internet Radio rugby show.......'In the Clubhouse' in which we try to capture that special atmosphere of the rugby clubhouse.....

The old clubhouse of my club Dixonians had a roaring open fire at our then base in Wassell Grove, Hagley next to our old friends and foes on and off the rugby field Old Halesonians, like 'The Dix' a traditional West Midlands 'Old Boys' rugby club, Dix being the club for the former pupils of the George Dixon Grammar School for Boys in City Road, Edgbaston in Birmingham. The school was founded in 1906 and the 'Old Dixonians Rugby Football Club' played its first game in December 1913 against the school 1st XV and the records reveal that the school won that inaugural fixture, played on a pitch on a farm at the back of Warley Woods 16 points to 11.

The Old Dixonians Rugby Football Club, as Edgbaston Dixonians RFC was initially known celebrates its centenary 1913 - 2013 this season with a centenary dinner at the Botanical Gardens inn Edgbaston on Saturday 14th September.

Warley Woods was The 'Peoples' Park....the only park in England to be founded by public subscription. Warley Woods opened in 1906 at the height of the Edwardian era just when Joseph (Old Joe) Chamberlain had founded The University of Birmingham, also in Edgbaston like George Dixon Grammar School for Boys.

The arch-Municipalist and former Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, father to arch-appeaser Neville and Nobel Laureate Austen Chamberlain, all three of them statesmen each of whom bestrode the House of Commons like a 'Colossus'......to quote Shakespeare.

Old Joe Chamberlain had just completed the Elan Valley Scheme which piped water from dams in North Wales into the homes of Birmingham artisans, craftsmen, manufacturers and workers to give them clean drinking water and improve public health at stroke, ridding the City of Birmingham of such water-borne diseases as Typhus and dysentery.

Enough of the history lesson, however at this time my soccer club Aston Villa Football Club AKA 'Historians F.C.' were 'in their pomp' winning league championships, FA Cups (in 1913 beating Sunderland 1 nil!) and doubles like it was going out of style.

Meanwhile that little club near Digbeth the 'Small Heathens' as I like to call them had only just come into public consciousness at the turn of the century....it took 'The Blues' until 1963 to win their first trophy, ironically against the Villa in the League Cup, when in most Birmingham soccer-loving households the glorious triumph of 'The Villans' against 'The Busby Babes' in the 1957 FA Cup final was still fresh in the minds, with bruising Irish centre-forward Peter Doherty breaking the shoulder of the Manchester United goalkeeper and forcing him from the field in the days before substitutes were allowed.....Villa won the game 2-1 and it is still even now one of the most controversial of FA Cup finals which began the great Villa/Red Devils rivalry.

Anyway, I digress, back to the subject in hand, rugby........

My point about my old rugby club Dixonians is that 'Old Boys Rugby' in this city and the clubs that once represented it is in terminal decline with clubs like mine Dixonians struggling to put out two teams every Saturday......

Aston Old Edwardians, the old boys club attached to King Edward's School, Aston near to Villa Park is struggling and is rooted to the bottom of Midlands West 2 (North) without a single point this season and 12 successive defeats.

Camp Hill Old Edwardians RFC based in Shirley Park in Haslucks Green Road in Shirley shipped 80 points in defeat last Saturday. Those three 'Old Boys' clubs were once the backbone of Greater Birmingham and North Midlands Rugby, winning many North Midlands Cups in the days before the leagues came in.

It is no coincidence that all three clubs were the 'Old Boys' clubs attached to three of the most successful Grammar Schools in the City of Birmingham.....other clubs like the Old Centrals and The Old Moseleians, with their famous 'Boggery Folk Club' which is where on Jasper Carrrott, an Old Moseleian himself, along with Carl Chinn, honed his songs and jokes, and in Carl's case his 'broad Brummie accent'......... are long gone...some still survive and thrive like the Old Saltleians in Water Orton and the Old Veseyans in Sutton Coldfield, but mostly the Old Boys rugby clubs are dying, which saddens me as a rugby traditionalist brought up through the old boys rugby system.

Incidentally, to preface a later part of this blog, Aston OE RFC's Gary Street, the 'Blonde Assassin' as we used to call him as he plied his trade as a jobbing scrum-half for what seemed like 20 years boy and man for Aston OE Rugby Club, has been coaching and guiding THE most successful international rugby team on this planet, the England Women's Rugby Team. 

Gary Street and his assistant, another local rugby stalwart, ex-Moseley and England Under 23 Prop Graham Smith originally from Wolverhampton Rugby Club have coached the England Women's XV for the last several years, taking his female charges to unprecedented success in international rugby with EIGHT, yes EIGHT successive Six Nations titles....and the icing on the cake for Gary and his players victories over New Zealand ladies, the strongest rugby nation on earth.

Many rugby aficionados reckon that this last weekend's first group of Six Nations fixtures gave us the best EVER start to this glorious tournament which warms the winter cockles of every true-born Englishman, Scotsman, Welshman and Irishman's hearts in the first three months of the year........!

This is when we 'Arrogant English' according to Scotland and Lions coach Jim Telfer, the week before the first Six Nations fixture will receive our comeuppance from 'plucky little Scotland' (that's my phrase, not that of 'Big Jim Telfer') Telfer was the most vicious rugby coach on this planet who played 'Bad Cop' to Lion's coach Ian McGeechan's 'Good Cop' on many a British Lions tour to the Southern Hemisphere and would think nothing of 'beasting' his players' to get them to play to their maximum.

Jim fails to assess the relative strengths of the two mis-matched sides: Scotland with their 11,000 rugby players to England's 100,000 players. England's infinite resources to Scotland's paltry two clubs playing in the inferior (to the RFU!) Celtic League or whatever the Celtic League is known as now......something like the 'Rabid Direct Championship'.

This 'Scotch Bravado' reminds the English to remember the Jacobite defeat at Culloden by the Red Coats and earlier on Edward the first, The 'Hammer of the Scots' sending the kilted marauders back 'Oop North' with their sporrans between their legs!

This was what Chris Robshaw and his 'White Orcs on Steroids' did to the Scots winning 38-18 on Saturday, the second time in two games that England have scored 38 points in home Tests, the first being when England defeated the World Champions last December, the mighty All Blacks. This charming epithet was what one New Zealand rugby journalist dubbed the English team just before the 2003 World Cup victory when England defeated an All Blacks side 15-13 in Auckland which gave the England team belief that they could win the 2003 World Cup in Australia......the rest, as they say.....is history........

To a dedicated 'Tolkienite' who reads and re-reads 'The Lord of the Rings' and reads 'The Hobbit' to his kids as a bedtime treat, this is manna from heaven to a Tolkien 'Fellow-Traveller' Brummie rugby fan like me for as we all know the City of Birmingham was the inspiration for the most-read book in the whole canon of English Literature: 'The Lord of the Rings'......enough of the history and literature lessons.....my Dad always said I should have been a teacher......I wanted to end this first blog 'The View from the Stands' with a reflection on the position of women's sport in this country...........

After the Olympics when we thrilled to the athletic antics of Jess Ennis on 'Super Saturday' and were transfixed by Team GB's women's hockey bronze (which we as a family managed to see at the Olympic Park) the Coalition Government hauled in whomsoever's turn it was to be BBC Director-General that week, after the George Entwhistle debacle as D.G. for 60 days to tell the 'BBC Luvvies', whom the Tories love to hate should show more Women's sport on the main BBC TV channels.......

Well, what do we get this weekend.....? The singularly most successful England team in ANY team sport you care to mention from tiddlywinks to table tennis is the England Woman's Rugby Team, with 8 successive Six Nations Championships, recent victories over World Champions 'The Black Ferns', the fearsome New Zealand Women's Rugby team, and what's more a 76-0 drubbing of the Scottish women at Esher Rugby Club on Saturday in this season's Six Nations Tournament opener.......what more do the BBC want to screen the England Women's Rugby team in action.......?

We the English (I hesitate to say the 'Great British' public) want to see successful England teams in action, the England Women's Soccer team proved that as they did better than their male counterparts at successive World and European Championships, and garnered record women's sport viewing figures.

Come on BBC give women a chance....women's sport is every bit as compelling as their male equivalents give us MORE! PLEASE!

The same happened with the recent stunning England Women's Netball victories over the Australian World Netball Champions, not one nil but a 3 nil whitewash....why wasn't this on BBC TV somewhere.....the 'Red Button' would be a start.....instead the England v Australia netball series was banished to radio on 'Radio Five Live Sports Extra'....whatever that may be?

If we are to get young girls and women interested in sport to ward off the potential obesity time bomb that all our kids are facing what better than to give these kids great role-models like the England women rugby players and the netballers for them to go out and emulate......?

We demand that the BBC shows more women's sport on TV instead of the endless diet of soccer that we currently get which is covered much better by SKY anyway.....there Blog and Rant over......!!!!!!!

PS Lance Armstrong is a cheat and should NOT be allowed to compete in ANY sport EVER again in my opinion...he should be a pariah and beyond the pale......!!!!!

'Boffin Bracey' AKA Keith Bracey, Sports Radio Birmingham's Rugby Show: 'In the Clubhouse' presenter (and amateur 'Historian'!