"not trying to con the referee with diving or going down like a sack of spuds clutching your face the moment another players touches you,"
But that is such a poor argument that ignores the context of both games. The reason rugby players don't do it is because exaggerating contact in rugby brings no benefit for the team. They do however cheat in many other ways. They lie on the ball and fail to release, they put their hands in the ruck, they put the ball in crooked at scrums. all moves they know are illegal which they do to gain an advantage in the hope that they can trick the ref.
As I said above you could equally point to the fact that any player raising his hands to an opponent gets a red card, in rugby such scuffles are treated as tempers flaring over and a talking to often suffices. If you wished to ignore the context in which both sports are played you could say that rugby in many ways excuses violence as understandable.
As I also previously mentioned rugby has a long history of failing to adequately punish the practice of eye gouging, an act which is a deliberate attempt to injure the eye area of fellow professionals, something which could not be levelled at football.
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Strange, I don’t recall any England rugby captains shagging their club team mates wife (Terry), calling someone “a fucking black cunt” (Terry again), or married players sending naked photos to glamour models (Cole), players sleeping with escort girls behind their pregnant wifes back (Rooney), missing drug tests (Ferdinand). Role models indeed!
Lobbing a few (consenting) dwarfs about does not really compare. "
Yeah but you did have three Lions players secretly filming a roasting session in a hotel room and their discussions over and the video of it going very public (Zebo, Murray, Cuthbert). You have Matt Stevens getting banned for 2 years for actually taking drugs etc.
TBH I don't go down the role model argument anyway as none of them are famous for their moral compass only their skill.
As I said in my first post both sports are fantastic sports which I love and play. I just can't stand idiots from either side who think that the way to promote their sport is to make uninformed and sweeping statements about the other. Both sports have such a huge amount of internal problems that they need to sort out before they start slinging mud at any other sport.