New world needs some new insults

When I went to play rugby league in Australia, I graduated from being called a Welsh bastard to a Pommie bastard. Neither title appealed to me but I learned to live with it because, as in most team games, every player is a bastard of some description.

If it isn't your nationality or colour that precedes the word it is the fact that you are blond, ginger, bald, fat, skinny or ugly.

It is about time that we lost these schoolyard habits. One of the great advances of the modern game is the fact that our club teams are now so cosmospolitan and it is a slur on the profession of rugby that we allow old prejudices to survive.

It was less than 50 years ago that the great rugby league legend Billy Boston had to leave his native Cardiff as a teenager because he was advised his colour would get in the way of him reaching the top in union. Thankfully, that level of evil racism has disappeared and even in the space of my playing career the situation improved tremendously.

When I was 22, I had my first experience of apartheid when I was invited to play in a World Sevens tournament in South Africa in a team that included Glen, one of the great Ella brothers. Glen and I went out for a drink and walked into a crowded bar that suddenly emptied as if by magic. It had not dawned on us that Glen, being an aborigine, wouldn't be welcome. We got merrily pissed together, almost as an act of defiance.

Those days have gone but intolerance hasn't gone completely and the controversy over the allegations of racism that followed the sending off of Gloucester's Olivier Azam and Newcastle's Tongan flanker Epi Taione last weekend indicates that few find any form of it acceptable. Whether or not Azam made the offending remark will be up to the authorities to sort out but the clear lesson is that players have a duty to themselves and their game to stamp out this offence.

I would be very surprised if Azam, who has probably heard a few rude references to his Frenchness in his time, is a racist. He plays in a team of nine different nationalities and would regard them all as his brothers. The trouble is that when your temper is at boiling point you are inclined to reach for the first insult you can think of. It doesn't excuse it but it might help to explain why it happens.

When I first went to play league with Widnes, I expected insults about being Welsh and having sexual relations with sheep but it was much worse for Martin Offiah. It didn't seem so bad when it happened in the heat of the moment – when I heard an opposition coach shout "Get that Welsh bastard" I was pleased somebody regarded me as a threat – but when they're at you throughout the game it can be upsetting.

That's what they're after, of course. The aim is not racism, it is to get you riled, like the sledging that goes on in cricket. Scott Hastings has admitted to calling Jeremy Guscott "an English black bastard" on one occasion. Guscott didn't hear him, but Hastings confessed to him later and apologised. Jerry replied: "It's OK, I had a better game than you anyway." To a Celt it would be a toss-up which was the most offensive part of Hastings' remark.

Seriously, it would be good for us to find another way of insulting each other.