It’s rugby season again folks. For Wales fans such as myself, this means six weeks of heartache and frustration, interrupted by fleeting moments of unfulfilled hope. Most Six Nations tournaments offer us the joy that is gazing upon the physique of Scrum Half Mike Phillips, but he’s shacked up with Duffy now and is pretending to be injured while he lives off her royalties. It’s over between us.
Wales lost their Six Nations opener to England yesterday, and my housemates saw a new side to me. Mum said today that she’d made up a new word in her agony (“dickwit” apparently describes Alun Wyn Jones) while I spent most of the 80 minutes writhing on the floor in front of the telly chewing on my fingers. So, this afternoon me and the old gits went to the pictures to watch a rugby match that we knew would have a happy ending; the new Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon thing about the 1995 World Cup in South Africa.
Morgan Freeman has finally got around to playing Nelson Mandela, and it’s obviously taken him so long because the voice coach was at the end of her tether. He just talks like Morgan Freeman, except maybe a bit slower. Matt Damon is surprisingly good, and the match scenes were authentic, but there was this bit where Mandela flew into a training session in a helicopter and this fucking appalling soft rock tune boomed out. It had the clumsiest, most obvious lyrics ever, about being “colourblind” and shit, while Mandela’s giving Matt Damon an envelope of fucking poetry to get him through the tournament. Worst scene in the film. It was only a short blip though, and the rest was actually pretty brilliant, especially a scene where the whole team goes and does a coaching session with some street kids in the slums. You can see it in everyone’s faces that they’re having a real ball getting involved with these tragic little urchins for the day. The kids were having the time of their lives.
