We're not saying there's a dreadful void of rugby news around at the moment BUT...Neil Francis has used his Sunday Independent column to criticise the concept of tattoos.
While many people will not agree with Francis' position on bodily ink - and a pedant could point out that playing a game based around enormous concussive collisions is possibly worse for your long-term health than the words 'Only God Can Judge Me' on your chest - it's a highly entertaining read, as Francis goes all Walt Whitman on the Irish sporting public.
The sub-heading on the article in the Sunday Independent reads "turning your skin into something that looks like rotting blueberries is a modern sporting curse".
Francis is essentially singing the body electric, and rejecting the bodily eclectic.
The column exults in the great feats of the human body during the Olympics, only to have the bare majesty of these achievements shrouded by the presence of tattoos:
The human form in its most magnificent condition. Most of them just sculpted but then a blotch, a copy-book doodle, a distracted six-year-old's efforts in art class on the healthiest and most radiant human skin.
Francis says that the "purity of Ali's movement in the ring is only matched by the immaculate and untainted nature of his skin", and, when he first encountered this epidermis epidemic in the Samoan rugby dressing room, he wasn't sure "whether to talk to them or read them".
To Francis, the inking of oneself as a youth is the one error you can't easily recover: dodgy hairstyles, clothes and music choices can be left behind, but tattoos are "pretty much forever". If youth is wasted on the young, then it would appear that tattoos are the sole constituent that continues to be thrusted upon the old.
Here's the killer closing line:
Whatever about the steady decline in sporting ethics and standards of play in the game, the additional unedifying spectacle of its participants running around like a painter's radio does not cut it with me.
I just wish here that they would choose not to. Somebody please call a halt.
You may not agree, but to be fair to Francis, he's rarely boring.
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