Nothing in sport, not even Tiger Woods's ego, has expanded as rapidly in volume over the past two decades as the average rugby player. Once there was room on the field of play for the svelte and the tubby, but nowadays it is filled with towering, muscular beasts whose heads disappear directly into their shoulders without the intervention of anything so namby-pamby as a neck. On stumbling across a Six Nations match anyone unfamiliar with rugby union would conclude that they were watching a Stonehenge lookalike contest. The late Bill McClaren routinely described large second-row forwards as "powerhouses". Nowadays even the backs are the size of nuclear reactors.
"Where did Mathew Tait get them thighs from?" a bloke said to me on Saturday night. He sounded like somebody asking about a stylish jacket that had caught his eye. But then, the idea that somewhere in Twickenham there is a big room with racks of giant pectorals, biceps, abs and quads and a group of skilled technicians busily bolting them on to the squad like ground crews arming an F1-11 hardly seems beyond the realms of possibility. By the time a player has been in the England squad for a couple of months he's more or less bound to look like he's been inflated with a foot pump. The day of the first armour-plated prop with integral turbo-booster is surely not far away.
My old geography teacher was forever showing us slides of topographical features and saying, "A typical terminal moraine, and that's my wife in the corner there for scale". He did this so often that the feeling grew among us that the only photos of Mrs Geography Master that existed showed her smiling wanly beside some gigantic erosional landform. Even the couple's wedding photos, we reckoned, probably showed them posed, diminutively, next to a drumlin.
When seen sporting among their fellows the vastness of the new breed of rugby stars is – like that of the landscape – not immediately obvious. In order fully to appreciate their immensity it is necessary to see them with a normal person placed – Mrs Geography Master-style – alongside. The effects of this can be witnessed on the BBC where Sonya McLaughlin generally finds herself standing on the touchline beside a couple of vast brutes with the sort of flattened features that suggest they are wearing stocking masks. The difference in size between McLaughlin and the two monoliths next to her is so great it creates the impression that the blonde Scot is far off in the distance. So powerful is this optical illusion that at times you feel certain she will have to ask her questions about just how vitally important the breakdown is going to be by shouting through a megaphone, or signalling with flags.
One man who doesn't require any help in convincing us of his ample proportions is Mathieu Bastareaud. We have only to watch him in action. When Bastareaud rampages forward would-be tacklers hang off the back of him, bouncing along the ground like tin cans trailing behind a newlywed couple's Ford Focus. The 17-stone Stade Français juggernaut has cheek muscles the size of most blokes' calves. I bet his spit could demolish a coal bunker.
The employment of Bastareaud marks something of a departure for France. While England teams have tended in recent times to concentrate on the three aitches (or, as BBC pundit Raphaël Ibanez prefers to think of it, the three apostrophes) of hugeness, hits and ham-fistedness, the French approach to the game has always been more subtle and intellectual, usually relying on the ability of their players to gradually wear opponents down by repeated declarations of the superiority of their own lifestyle over that of all other nations. This has proved particularly effective in the intimate confines of the scrum where after 65 minutes of listening to the whispering about the TGV, Périgord truffles and the scent of Catherine Deneuve's hair even hard men like Brian Moore have lost the will to fight.
Stopping Bastareaud will be the key to beating the French, but how to go about it? The Scots showed that brute force is useless. Shouting, clapping and whistling whenever he gets the ball in the hope that the loud noise will confuse him, causing him to run in the wrong direction, is one possibility; employing a cunning defensive cover of maths questions and tickling another. So far the only thing that has successfully brought the 21-year-old from Créteil down is a New Zealand hotel table, but even Martin Johnson will surely balk at picking anything as inanimate as that.
In the end the best hope for the home nations is surely to put their trust in the maverick France coach, Marc Lièvremont. Lièvremont wears polo-neck sweaters and glasses and generally looks like one of those spiffy French philosophers who spend their time arguing persuasively that they don't exist, while running around bedding film stars. Last week he told this newspaper that in the Six Nations, "Our biggest rival is the France team itself". The France coach was surely being unduly modest, since he seems more capable of derailing his side than even his players are. He is a contrarian by nature. If enough people express the view that France's best weapon is the mighty centre Bastareaud, then Lièvremont will, in all likelihood, drop him immediately. Well, I've done my bit.
