Source.

Glued to the Six Nations rugby, I’m wondering if negotiating the shape of the ball, * with its unpredictable bounce, might be compared to going on stage with a violin whose strings never stay in tune—like playing baroque violin in an overheated concert hall (he said with feeling—see The Mary Celeste).

On the plus side, concerts are less muddy, with fewer injuries, and you don’t get sent off so often. As to referees (Confucius), musos’ attitude to conductors is more like that of footballers than rugby players.

Salvador Dali, The persistence of memory (1931).

Such a degree of unpredictability is rarely built into the design of the game—as if tennis rackets were crafted from blancmange. Nor did elliptical balls catch on with other sports, like snooker. To cast the net wider, it’s like a steering wheel that offers few clues to the direction of the car, or a novel whose pages the publisher prints in a random order.

This is part of mini-series on rugby under A sporting medley: ritual and gender, featuring the haka and some arcane rules. For more on the perils of tuning in Western Art Music, see under Hugh Maguire, and Muso speak: excuses and bravado (“It was in tune when I bought it”). More unlikely inventions here.

* Apart from unseemly anatomical explanations involving the shape of the pig’s bladder, and posh public-school twats, some suggest that it’s harder to dribble with the feet as in football, and that the oval ball is easier to carry with one arm, leaving the other arm free to push adversaries away—reminding me of the shakuhachi flute as potential weapon (komusō monks rebuked for “meddling in earthly affairs and not the emptiness of being”).