One Saturday last November I made the discovery on a football field at Tonbridge that the human head is a far more solid object than the human knee. For a fortnight I stayed indoors, my leg supported by a bank of cushions. In some such way, I told myself, in four or five, in six or seven years’ time, I should make an end of Rugby football. Not many people play Rugby much after they are thirty. How many were left, I asked myself, of the odd forty-five or fifty who had turned up for those first post-war trials at the Old Deer Park. How many of those who had played in the 1919 A sides were still playing? Half a dozen? Barely that, perhaps. You do not notice them as they slip out. A side alters so little from one week to another, from one season to another. You always seem to be playing with the same people. But when you compare the team photograph of 1919 with the team photograph of 1923, then you realise. Where have they all gone, you ask yourself. Have they gone abroad, or have they married or taken up golf? Usually the end comes abruptly. There is no gradual retirement. Rugby is a game that you play every Saturday, or not at all. You cannot pick it up and drop it, and pick it up again as you can cricket and golf and tennis. You go on playing till a knee goes, or an ankle, or a shoulder, and your doctor tells you that rugger is a young man’s game. That is why, perhaps, we value it so highly: why we are ready to sacrifice for it so much that tempts us. We know that it is an excitement that will be soon taken from us. I am twenty-five. It is nine years since I spent a day in bed. But already I am beginning to find football something of a strain. The stiffness that used to last rarely over Sunday is still with me on Tuesday night. And as I pondered this, I began to realise to what an extent football, during the last four years, has given pattern to my life. For four years I have been unable during the winter to accept any invitation to lunch on Saturday. I have never been able to go away for a week-end. Saturday evenings I have striven hard to keep free from parties; and I have done my best for Friday nights as well. I have never been able to go away anywhere between October and the end of March for more than six days on end.