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On Friday 15th December 2006 former American football player Dan Strayer had a comparative piece aired on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, presenting a balanced article on the relative “toughness” of our sport compared to rugby. Broadcast during Tom Williams weekly Talksport show at approximately 18:50, the pre-recorded piece included interviews with Cats players from the previous weeks practice, as well as comments from Jon Ware, a Texas native now playing rugby for Cambridge Rugby Club. Ware admitted that there’s “a little different style”, insinuating one holds back when tackling so as to avoid personal injury.
Cats MVP Ray Palmer points out that you “become more reckless” and “tackle a lot harder” because of the pads worn, and this was echoed by the narrative of Dan Strayer voiced. Cat’s rookie James Wyatt, interviewed as a rugby player transferring to football, suggested that football is less rule-bound in terms of tackling, allowing for a more physical sport that he now prefers.
Strayer then goes out to mention the similarities between the two, mentioning how football has evolved from rugby and its continual development has improved the sport and separated it in its own right.
Cambridge Rugby Head Coach James Shanahan then goes on to re-iterate the common ground between both sports, as “high combat sports with a lot of collisions” requiring players to be “very physical, have to be very strong, very powerful, very fit”. Ware then stated how he prefers the “brotherhood” found in rugby, before Palmer retorted how football is “like chess, a strategic play” and thus “every play is played at 110%”. The narrator then wrapped up with “well my friend, we’ve come to the end of this argument, lets call it a truce”.
The piece took the form of a hypothetical bar-room discussion and was excellently balanced, great advertisement for the sport without trying to belittle our competitor. The rugby guys to their credit were complementary without being patronising. It was great to have someone from outside the Cats/BAFL doing such a great job on our behalf, especially as the 8 minute piece broadcast during the show previewing the biggest soccer derby the city has seen in decades, ensuring that the listener figures would have been bolstered compared to the 125,000 average.