In the year of Our
Lord, 1800 and 23,
William Webb Ellis
invented rug-bee,
He was playing
football, when just for fun,
He picked up the ball
and away did run;
At a fee-paying
school, the pupils are master,
The teachers all
cried: “Good show, Ellis, just run faster!
Carry the ball and use
your hands to pass,
This game shall be for
the ruling-class!
The Oiks might think
you’ve gone off your rockah,
But we’ll play ruggah,
they’ll play soccah.”
And so William Webb
Ellis achieved his fame,
By inventing a brand
new top toff game –
But just imagine he’d
been a Socialist,
And liberated money,
not ball, with his bourgeois fist,
Just imagine when he
went off his rocker
That he emptied his
teammates’ burgeoning lockers,
And then gave the poor
all his teammates’ money,
And just imagine that
the masters found that funny;
It means that world tournament
of rugby nations,
Would today see acts
of financial liberation,
Two sets of teams,
both scoring points,
By redistributing
wealth to all us oiks
Stealing money from merchant
and from banker,
And if they didn’t,
the crowd'd cry “------”
.
Passing money to the
poor would be the aim
Of all these televised
rugby games,
The BBC clean round
the bend,
In its new role as the
People’s Friend;
And so William Webb
Ellis, you so nearly could
Have been a latter day
Robin Hood,
You could have been a
postmodernist icon
Of proletarian
liberation;
But you show that
anarchy is not just destruction,
It can be an act of
imaginative invention -
And so the next time
you see rugby on TV,
Just reflect on what
might have been,
And hope that some
modern day William Webb Ellis
Will destroy upper
class Ascot, Henley, Wimbledon and tennis,
And then in a final
act of resurrectionist rage,
Reverse the rules of
the Stock Exchange,
By leading all the
toffs of the world in this millenarian strain:
“It’s the same the
whole world over,
It’s the rich wot gets
the blame,
It’s the poor wot gets
the treasure,
It’s wot we calls the
People’s Game.”
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