RUGBY union seldom gets my blood stirring – must be those days in a comprehensive school with pretensions to be a grammar school forcing us to indulge in the 15-a-side code.

All that did however was give free licence to the yobs from the three neighbouring council estates from which we were all culled to indulge in outright thuggery.

And if you were small then you were out on the wing and unless you had the speed of a fledgling Tommy Smith, the famous American sprinter of Black Power fame, not the Liverpool dreadnought defender of they shall not pass infamy, then you were fair game, a natural target for a proper battering.

The phrase “piley-on” never had more painful resonance than when you were underneath the kicking, punching, hacking melee in which your body was gradually compressed ensuring an impression several inches deep in the mud.

It’s not that I have a chip on my shoulder. As all columnists I try to maintain balance, so as regards rugby union I have a chip, or rather a sack of potatoes, upon each shoulder.

What irked me just as much as the outbreak of scragging each third week – we alternated between union, footy and cross-country during autumn, winter and spring at the now defunct St Kevin’s RC comp – was that just up the road were the likes of rugby league bastions such as St Helens, Widnes and Wigan, the latter being my particular RL faves.

Never mind that league was always sidelined or shuffled to some northern corner by the BBC when the then Five-Nations was in full flow, at least rugby league was shown regularly by the Beeb. And in the safe-hands stewardship of commentating legend Eddie Waring, televised rugby league was for many years a major treat.

But in our school, never, and I mean never, was the 13-a-side oval-balled game ever considered. It was deemed populist and for the hoi-polloi.

For us spotty, gawky specimens, who, in truth only ever wanted to imitate our Red or Blue footy heroes, it was hoity-toity rugby union and all the bullet-headed, knuckle-brained carnage that that entailed thanks to our school population never being short of teenagers handy with fists, boots and foreheads.

Maybe all those critics who have carped at my league favouritism can perhaps understand my antipathy to the game of Webb Ellis, Old Blanktonians and booting that bloody oval ball ad bloody nauseam. Oh aye, at St Kev’s we even did Latin, with our school motto being Respice Finem translated as look to the end.

That was eminently applicable to our fun-filled union duels when all you wanted to hear was the shrill of the final whistle, though that did not always guarantee the cessation of hostilities.

But today union will have centre-place in the Kelly household because the Six Nations, as it is now that Italy are included in the chasing pack, pitches England against Wales in the most eagerly-anticipated showdown between the keen rivals for many a season.

The game is not only England’s first at Twickenham, but the first meaningful exchange at headquarters since their World Cup campaign was dwarfed by indiscipline and ineptitude.

The red rose ranks are under the stewardship of Stuart Lancaster – not yet permanently mind – whose new broom has thrust aside some of the dead weight of the World Cup to be replaced by several young tyros.

So far there has been a brace of wins, albeit far from completely convincing, against Scotland and Italy. But the nous of Lancaster in shaping a new team spirit seems to be getting through.

However, the likes of Owen Farrell, Brad Barritt and Chris Robshaw are in line to meet their sternest examination yet.

The Welsh too have two wins to their name, ousting Ireland and the can’t-cross-the-whitewash Scots.

Their ranks are largely the same which unluckily missed out on a mercurial advance to the World Cup final in New Zealand.

And those talents such as Leigh Halfpenny, captain Sam Warburton, Alex Cuthbert and fellow wing George North – who at, 6ft 4in tall and weighting 17st 6lb, charges like a jet-propelled outhouse door – are chiselling out reputations that could accord them the legendary status of Welsh icons as J P R Williams, Barry John, Jonathan Edwards and Jonathan Davies.

The visit of the men of Harlech to England’s home battleground is a showdown of style and substance and sheer sinew-busting skill as far removed from St Kev’s fields of gore as an investment banker’s bonus from you and me checking our meagre bank balances.

Bring it on boyos.