Negative headlines follow England around as the distractions pile up

RUGBY Union has been professional for 16 years now, but there are times when a few of the game’s best practitioners still think they are back in the amateur days of buying gallon jugs of beer and belting your pals with trophies.

It was fun back then, but nobody paid players to play. Indeed, it cost you money to play, from beginner to international, so there was a laissez-faire attitude to amateur players. That has all changed now.

The art of coarse rugby is simply not one which should be practised by the best professional players. Certainly not by internationalists. Certainly not at the World Cup. Certainly not by one of their number who has recently married into the Royal Family. Certainly not in an era where media scrutiny is guaranteed and everyone with a mobile phone is a potential paparazzo.

Yet England’s rugby team have done it again. The only reaction when you read of them attending a “Mad Midget” night in a bar in New Zealand where Mike Tindall, aka Mr Zara Phillips, was engulfed by a “blonde beauty” is this: what on earth were they thinking?

Remarkably, the RFU does not seem to have any problem with what has happened. An England team spokesperson said yesterday: “Mike and several of the players were enjoying an evening out after he had led the team to a hard-earned victory over Argentina.

“Like all the lads, he plays for England with a massive amount of passion and he was relaxing after a tough match.”

But make no mistake, this is a huge scandal and it will run and run, with the mystery blonde due for discovery, and then the encounter between Tindall and his Royal missus when she joins him in New Zealand.

Perhaps the most despicable aspect for many people was that England’s players were even inside a bar that promotes dwarf games. Antipodean attitudes to dwarfism may be antediluvian, but does that exempt England’s players from the proper behaviour, i.e. to walk away and have nothing to do with it?

After all, the Altitude Bar was advertising widely that it was hosting a “Mad Midget Weekender” complete with “leprechaun bar wars” and midgets with bungee cords racing each other. They may not have actually propelled any small person, but did the England players not ask themselves what was likely to happen if they went in?

The events might not be linked, but a theme is building here: England are not having the smoothest of World Cups, and the distractions are piling up.

Courtney Lawes has been banned for two games for a reckless challenge on Mario Ledesma – he kneed the Argentine in the head – in a match which England scraped through.

The ball was blamed for Jonny Wilkinson’s poor kicking record in the perfectly still Otago Stadium, with the manufacturers forced to defend their product.

Then it was England’s turn to examine their own equipment when they were told to avoid a repeat of the numbers peeling off their jerseys, as happened in their first match.

Having just managed to beat Argentina, the England lads went bungee-jumping, with coach Martin Johnson defending his men by saying that at least they had not been skiing.

Prop Andrew Sheridan is coming home, his usually massive contribution to the English cause now over due to injury, and a question mark emerging over his career.

And now this: lurid front page headlines about the England captain in The Sun yesterday. Johnson had already been forced to explain his policy on drink. On the day they left London, he said there would be no booze bans, adding: “When I started playing rugby at senior level you were dealing with blokes.

“They treated us like adults and there is no reason to change that now they are professionals and things are far more organised in the game. They are there to make sensible decisions – if I can’t trust them, there is a simple choice for us to make.”

Having seen The Sun’s pictures of his players on their night out, larking around with dwarves, perhaps Johnson might be reconsidering his original thoughts.

For he also made this comment recently: “We have got to be careful. It is a different world to what it was 20 years ago. I remember going to New Zealand as a British Lion in 1993 and the boys had good fun, but they have got to be careful not to put themselves and their team mates at risk.”

In contrast, Scotland have gone about their business quietly and steadily since arriving first in Australia for a training camp and then hopping over to New Zealand where they have opened with two wins out of two. The headlines have been about rugby, and a brief encounter with a kangaroo is the closest the players have strayed towards scandal. The talk is of throwing passes rather than throwing dwarves.

And all the while, that keenly-anticipated Scotland v England match is getting closer and closer. The old rivals will meet in Auckland in two weeks’ time. Just who maintains their focus between now and then could go a long way towards influencing the outcome.