FEISTY GE0RGIANS EVEN HAD A GO AT SIR TREVOR!

IT really is no surprise that it went off in training between England and Georgia’s rugby teams this week. Georgian sportsmen are by nature a combative lot. In 1996, England’s footballers played in Tbilisi, and a press XI game was arranged for earlier that day with local journalists. Ringers are common in these matches. Jean Tigana once turned out for France’s media in the same year he had been voted the country’s Footballer of the Year. Anyway, it got a little heated and one of the Georgians punched an English player on the nose. Then again, who hasn’t in their time been enraged by the antics of midfield enforcer, Sir Trevor Brooking? After the match, as Brooking sat on the coach with an Xmarks-the-spot dressing on his hooter, the Georgian player came up to apologise. ‘I am sorry — are you OK?’ he asked. Brooking (left) replied with a look of utter contempt and an even more nasal tone than usual, ‘No.’ ‘I was standing right there when it happened,’ Ray Wilkins said later — it really was a press team in the loosest sense of the word that day — ‘I would have jumped in to help him, but I was laughing too much.’