WHEN I worked at the Express & Star in the 70s amazingly we had enough fit and/or experienced journalists to put together a rugby team. Apart from Tony Raba.

He was a smoker and a fly fisher, was built like a whippet and we needed one more to make up the team for a particular match so we stuck him on the wing. He was certainly fast. I’ve never seen anyone avoid a rugby ball so quickly in my life.

The game in question was against Tarmac – and grief they were big blokes – played at Dudley Kingswinford.

The pitch we were allocated dipped away rather alarmingly into one corner and it was raining as it had been doing pretty solidly for the previous 24 hours.

It made for an interesting game. At one point there was a mad scramble for the ball in that corner and at the bottom of the heap was my mate Dave Britton who worked with me on the sports desk.

He finally emerged covered from head-to-toe in mud. And that was a couple of years before the iconic picture of Fran Cotton taken during the Lions 1977 tour of New Zealand. He went on to live with the nickname Mudman.

The thing is that wet and muddy conditions were good enough for a bunch of hacks playing in the West Midlands and they were good enough for the country’s elite players taking on the world’s best.

But seemingly such conditions are not good enough for Wasps.

Rugby is a tough game often played in tough conditions, but Wasps have rather left themselves open to being ridiculed as a bunch of Southern softies after Friday night’s debacle.

They – and more importantly – their fans travelled all the way to Sale for a premiership match only for Wasps to deem that the pitch was too wet to play on.

Needless to say Sale and their players were less than impressed. Mark Cueto, the Sale and England wing, described Wasps’ action as a shambles and a total joke.

“It’s not even that bad. It is a little bit wet, but it is a rugby field at the end of the day.”

English rugby at both national and club level has been going through torrid times and this latest headline-making incident has done nothing to smooth the path.

It is to be hoped therefore that Wasps follow the action of the Wigan players humiliated 9-1 by Spurs and dig into their pockets to refund the cash forked out by the travelling fans.

Meanwhile there will be one corner of the Wasps set up breathing a sigh of relief at the abandoned game – the laundry room.