IN ONE of his early matches as a football referee Paul Durkin booked his younger brother. It might have been an unequivocal indication of his refusal to be influenced by anything other than the laws of the game “Actually, it was an easy decision,” he said “It was a dreadful tackle. Graham took this guy off somewhere around the waist and there couldn’t be any other choice but to issue a caution The trouble was that he got home first and told our mum. England, even with Tom Finney, Billy Wright, Wilf Mannion and Stan Mortensen, lost 1-0 to the Americans in the 1950 World Cup. Everyone here thought it was the end of the world, the biggest disaster that England would ever experience and the lowest point the nation’s football fortunes would ever reach But it wasn’t, was it?. We might be surprised at how quickly rugby’s image improves.ENGLAND can provide solace for Brazil who were beaten 1-0 by the USA in the Concacaf Gold Cup semi-finals in Los Angeles last week. The defeat went down like a set of lead maracas in Rio de Janeiro where words such as shame and disgrace were common.They need fear not.

How much of an effect does all that have on the mind-set of the players? Kevin Yates is a very good prop and as tough as one needs to be in the most macho of positions. Those he meets in front-row confrontations at club level report that they have not recognised any lurking appetite for wrongdoing. He is regarded as jovial bloke and there are certainly no teethmarks in his record.I began by puzzling over what plants in a man’s mind the urge to inflict such an awful injury. Instinctive retaliation, cold revenge or just another way of being beastly to the enemy? Just as uncertain is whether he, alone, should be held responsible for the birth of that urge and for the lack of restraint that caused him to succumb to it.I have no idea what the Bath coaches say to their players before they go out for the conflict. They should be just as eager to accept their share of the responsibility for ridding the game of such ugliness. The club should bear the ultimate liability for those they put on to the pitch Let them, as well as the culprits, be punished.

They may well warn them not to stamp on the opposition or stiff-arm them. Maybe, the last words they hear as they disappear up the tunnel are “and, remember, definitely no biting”.But if all that ring in their ears are the urgent exhortations that have become the tom-toms of the pre-match pep-talk, then the culpability for what happens in the furnace into which a front-row forward is pitched may be justifiably shared.I fully support the clubs in the struggle to retain control over their players, the source of their funding and the structure of the season. They created their own culture of brutality and for most of the time were proud of it. Now that new attitudes are blowing across the face of the game, they may feel less comfortable about the viciousness but one doesn’t sense a genuine attempt to curb it.In the privacy of the dressing-room before a match all manner of ritualised bonding and psyching-up goes on.

The referee didn’t see it and Johnson received a one-match ban from England.Rugby has never been less than a violent game and most of those associated with it have accepted, mostly humorously, that sometimes there is dirty work to be done and the game is highly selective about what it condones and what it condemns.When they were all amateurs, the inclination was to let them get on with it. There can be no place for that sort of behaviour in the game but it requires a monumental effort to be moralistic about rugby. Biting, which is in danger of becoming a fashionable transgression, has a large recoil factor, but there are more perilous sins.When the England lock Martin Johnson, captain of the Lions, punched the All Black scrum-half, Justin Marshall, from behind in the England-New Zealand international at Old Trafford in November he did so with a force that could have reduced Marshall’s ears to ornament status. There isn’t a proper appeal procedure in place yet, so there is no indication of the cost or time involved if he decides to fight on.How much Bath will help him with the financial penalties is not yet known. The initial impression was that the club might decide to terminate his contract; still a possibility if he appeals and fails. The latest indication, however, is that they will stick by him and may even find him some community or promotional work while he is sidelined.