Age: 22 going on three-and-a-half
Appearance: Not to be confused with the other James. James Small is the hot-tempered wing, turned fashion model. James Dalton is the hot-tempered hooker with stick-on ears and a familiar face, who has an uncanny resemblance to a police identikit sketch.
Contribution to rugby: Demonstrating that even rugby players have feelings by crying on prime-time
Isn’t that a contradiction? Rugby is a game of subtleties. The weekend play that left France’s Philippe Benetton with a broken arm and the Ivory’s Coast’s Max Brito paralysed was normal, acceptable violence. The Port Elizabeth friendly, free-for-all was gross, unacceptable violence and must be punished.
So Dalton is a kind of ritual sacrifice? The arcane rites of rugby baffle outsiders. But in this case even insiders are puzzled about why five men were singled out when the skirmish involved half of both teams, and saw the most accurate punch come from Hennie Le Roux, who’s still in the game.
Isn’t the ref at fault then? We all know he behaved as if he’d left his bi-focals at home and was trained in Japan, but wouldn’t you have been tempted by Dalton’s overheated face? That stomp on a flattened Canadian’s knee, captured for endless television replays, didn’t help either.
Who’s really to blame? Any witch hunt should include the designer of the Canadian jersey. The decision to send them out in that incongruous, easy-to-rip, maple- leaf design challenged testosterone levels, making them play extra rough so people would still think they were men, even though they looked like sissies.
Will Dalton recover? It could be worse. If he’d stood on the ref’s toe he’d be banned for life. Or he could have done something actually dangerous – like calling him “an old poepal,” an outrage which would have got 120 days instead of a mere 30 for fighting.
Any lessons? Hopefully the Truth Commission took copious notes of the World Cup’s awesome tactics. They only had the guys for a couple of hours before Dalton was blubbering like a boy and Pieter Hendriks was confessing guilt and apologising to the nation.
What is the man in the street saying? “Outrageous! Disgusting! What animals! It’s this kind of barbaric behaviour that gives rugby a bad name.”
But what do we really think? “Great! Give us more! This is what stops rugby from becoming as boring as