Only 43 days married, and Mike’s playing away

How Mike Tindall, captain of England and newest member of the Royal Family, must yearn for the good old days of amateur rugby union when drinking capacity counted for almost as much as scrummaging prowess.

Pre-professionalism, the rugby adage of “what goes on tour, stays on tour” reigned supreme and touring players could belt out 100 revolting verses of the Ball of Kirriemuir safe in the knowledge that their antics would never get back to their very much better halves.

Nowadays, however, new media and rugby professionalism have ripped up the tour rules of old.

As Tindall has found, the days when a bit of light vandalism or getting involved with the local pulchritude would have been passed off as the high spirits of rugger types have long gone.

In the modern age, video footage showing beery indiscretions at a “Mad Midget Weekend” and an England Captain grappling with a mysterious blonde can wing its way home faster than it takes the Extra Bs to sing Roll Me Over in the Clover.

Courtesy of YouTube, Tindall’s new wife – the Queen’s grand-daughter Zara Phillips – knows all about her husband of having his balding head kissed by an attractive admirer.

Amidst the tabloid outcry, the English rugby brotherhood yesterday attempted to limit the poor publicity that has resulted from Tindall letting what’s left of his hair down the day after England’s victory against Argentina last Saturday.

A source, who knows Princess Anne’s son-in-law, insisted that the blonde in the Altitude Bar, Queenstown, was merely an “old friend”.

She was seen knocking back a shot while chatting with Tindall at the bar, which just happened to be hosting a dwarf-racing contest at the time.

CCTV footage, posted on websites, showed Tindall, who had been married only 43 days at the time, put his arm around her before they appeared to kiss.

They were then pictured outside the bar in the street where Tindall still had his arm around his female drinking companion before they went their separate ways.

Tindall’s team-mates leapt to their captain’s defence. “We weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary,” claimed the England wing Chris Ashton. “There were dwarves there, yes, but that was just the night the bar was having. We didn’t bring them with us or anything like that. It’s just lads enjoying a night out.”

The team manager Martin Johnson has said he has no intention of disciplining Tindall – not even in a players’ Kangaroo Court, which, in days gone by, would have handed out heinous drinking penalties for fraternising with the opposite sex.

“Rugby player drinks beer – shocker,” was Johnson’s reaction to the footage, a response that might suggest that he is a throwback to tour managers of the amateur era. Students of the game may cast their minds back to the 1968 British Lions “wreckers” tour of South Africa when the UK’s rugby elite amused themselves by asking girls to donate their underwear for the impromptu bonfires that they lit on their travels.

It was on this tour that the team manager David Brooks was presented with a £900 damages bill from an irate hotel owner. “Couldn’t have been much of a party,” was the unimpressed manager’s reaction.