Anonymous 15

Column No. 1

Anonymous 15 has played rugby long enough to know better. The bag is already by the front door.

There is something specific about a rugby kit bag on a Tuesday night in November. Not the bag itself — the bag is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if it's a battered duffel with a broken zip or something expensive you bought during a brief period of optimism. What matters is the interior ecosystem, which is always, without exception, identical.

Top layer: the clothes you wore to work, folded with unreasonable neatness. Below that: a stud wrench for boots you no longer own. Three half-unrolled strips of sock tape, grey with lint. A sports bra that lost its elasticity somewhere around 2021 but has retained every memory of a rain-soaked away fixture you'd rather forget. And at the very bottom, beneath the loose ibuprofen and a banana that has been in there since September: the smell. Deep heat and damp turf and cold changing rooms and something that might generously be described as unwashed pride.

We carry our lives in these bags.

Nobody made us do this. We chose it. After a forty-hour week, against all available evidence that it was a reasonable idea, we chose it.

That's probably the first thing you should know about me.

I'm not going to tell you who I am. That's the point.

I could play for your club. I could play against your club. I could be standing next to you every Tuesday night, eating that banana I should have thrown away in September.

What I will tell you is this: I've been around rugby long enough to have seen things. Good things, strange things, things that should never have happened at an away fixture in Coventry. I've seen players retire so many times that nobody bothers saying goodbye anymore. I've seen friendships survive injuries, bad selections, heavy defeats and committee meetings — particularly committee meetings.

The game changes. The people don't.

Every club has these stories. Every team has them. Every player has a few they'd rather nobody found out about.

Those are the ones we'll be talking about.

See you next issue.

— Anonymous 15

“Anonymous 15 is a fictional character. Or is she?”