Rugby has bigger issues than Exeter’s feathered headdresses

How reassuring that rugby, assailed on all fronts by potentially existential crises, is grappling with issues that truly matter. After the revelation that almost a quarter of elite players may have some degree of brain injury, and after a lockdown cycle in which English rugby had to be saved from oblivion by a £135million government bail-out, Wasps have decided that the game’s interests are best served by questioning the right of Exeter Chiefs fans to wear Native American headdresses.

Nothing, it seems, guarantees an easy win in the court of online opinion quite like an accusation of cultural appropriation. The move would perhaps come across as more sincere if Exeter had initiated it, accepting that the old Devonian custom of calling the first XVS of clubs “Chiefs” was a weak justification for dressing as they do, or for singing tomahawk chop chants. But for Wasps to make such a fuss, issuing a 538-word statement and warning that Exeter supporters’ kitschy headgear will cause offence when the teams face off at the CBS Arena on Saturday, smacks of a frivolous waste of time.

On exactly whose behalf are Wasps acting here? So far they are the only Premiership club to raise these concerns, and they are doing so in response to the protests of a single fan group. This issue is not, contrary to their hand-wringing rhetoric about “holding ourselves to account” or rejecting iconography that “doesn’t align with our values”, borne of some inexorable groundswell of opinion. This appears less a case of making difficult choices than of pandering to the perpetually outraged.

On the streets around their Coventry ground, the question of whether Native American sensibilities are affronted by the gaudy antics of a rugby club 175 miles away is unlikely to resonate.

Rugby has far thornier diversity problems to tackle than this.

Former England player Ugo Monye, recently appointed to lead the Rugby Football Union’s diversity and inclusion advisory group, has previously accused the game of not caring enough about racism. Sale’s Marland Yarde described in September 2020 how he had been racially abused at a Premiership game earlier in that season. England prop Ellis Genge, raised on a Bristol council estate, has long lamented the sport’s lack of urgency in diversifying and its stubborn image as a destination for the affluent and the privately educated.

These, surely, are the causes with which rugby should be preoccupied, not the insistence by Exeter diehards on wearing feathery fancy dress.