disorientated and naked - we've all been there

After the flurry of sordid sexual revelations about senior England footballers in recent weeks, it's good to be able to report that rugby is keeping its end up, as it were, as well. It's interesting to reflect how the nature of the offences committed mirrors the intrinsic character of each sport: the footballing misdemeanours tend to be ill-advised encounters with glamour models in swanky London hotels, speeding in and/or crashing expensive cars, that sort of thing, whereas the rugby ones tend to be largely tales of drink-related carnage, public nudity and lavatorial antics. A couple of absolutely prime examples just in the last fortnight or so:

Andy Powell's golf-buggy drink-driving exploits are pretty amusing, though not so much for the player himself now he's been dropped from the Wales squad by Warren Gatland and banned from driving for 15 months.

Even better is the story of Sydney Roosters rugby league player Nate Myles, who was heavily fined after an incident which has apparently became known as Dumpgate. The official NRL statement summarises far more succinctly and amusingly than I ever could:

Shortly after 8am on Sunday morning Myles was apparently disorientated and naked in a hotel corridor and attempted to gain entry into the room of a family who was leaving their accommodation. A short time after his entry was refused and the family had left he was found to have defecated elsewhere in the hotel corridor and was later discovered in a fire escape.

Both of these indiscretions pale into insignificance in comparison with the alcohol-fuelled form-sheet of former Australian rugby league player and current Italian rugby union outside-half Craig Gower, though. Between exposing himself to an Irish backpacker in a bar in Sydney in 1999 and starting a brawl in a nightclub in the same city in 2007, he produced a possibly unsurpassable display of depraved drunken misbehaviour at a charity golf event in 2005, the edited highlights of which include:

• groping the daughter of former rugby league star Wayne Pearce
• threatening and chasing Pearce's son Mitchell
• subsequently vomiting over him
• streaking around the resort
• driving a golf buggy across the greens (possibly while still naked, I'm not sure)
• subsequently crashing and wrecking the buggy
• holding a butter knife to the throat of a local radio personality
• eventually being thrown out of the resort by security

Textbook stuff; it's possibly only spoiled by his not having had a big steaming shit on the carpet, or the 18th green, or the bonnet of someone's car, or something like that. I suppose at least that leaves some scope for improvement when the next generation of drunken meatheads comes along to pick up the baton. Records are made to be broken, after all.