To many Americans soccer is a game played by national groups in the big cities and by high schools, prep schools, and colleges too small or too poor to support football. Soccer, actually, is an extremely fast, highly scientific game whose playing evokes from the crowds very much the same passions that are evident at Busch Stadium or Ebbets Field. There is no gentlemanly restraint about questioning an official's decision in soccer as there is in cricket. The British version of "ya bum, ya" rolls over the stadium on Saturday afternoons. Once I heard a staid working-class housewife address a referee who had awarded a free kick against Arsenal as "Oh, you bloody man!" The English can go no further in vituperation. Although soccer is principally the game of Britain's working masses, there are some among the middle class who find it entrancing. But the great game of this class in the autumn and winter is rugby football. Here we encounter a social difference. Rugby was popularized at a public school and is pre-eminently the public-school game. The "old rugger blue" is as much a part of the rugby crowd as the ex-tackle from Siwash in the American football crowd. The games, incidentally, have a good deal in common and require similar skills. There is no blocking or forward passing in rugby, but the great backs of rugby football would hold their own in the American game. In the middle class it is good form to have played rugby or to watch rugby. At the big games at Twickenham just outside London one will see a higher percentage of women than at the major soccer matches. The difference between the classes watching the two sports is emphasized by the difference in clothing. Twickenham costumes are tweeds, duffel coats, old school ties, and tweed caps. At Wembley there are the inevitable raincoat (usually called a "mac"), the soft gray hat, and the decent worsted suit of the industrial worker on his day off. Rugby crowds are as partisan as soccer crowds but less vociferous. A bad decision will occasion some head-shaking and tut-tutting, but there will be little shouted criticism--with one exception: the Welsh.