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A Guide To Boris Johnson's Greatest Sporting Moments

A Guide To Boris Johnson's Greatest Sporting Moments
Conor Neville
By Conor Neville
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Britain's new foreign secretary is an enthusiastic sportsman, albeit not an especially graceful one. Unsurprisingly for an Eton boy, Johnson remains devoted to the 'peerless game of the elliptical ball'.

He has told interviewers that he spent his happiest hours packing down in the front row for his university team.

In one of his quasi-comic interviews with Jeremy Paxman, he was directed back to his previous analogy of his, in which he said he would only pursue the role of prime minister if 'the ball came loose from the scrum'.

A dogged Paxman drilled down into the analogy, asking Johnson where the ball lay at the time of the interview - this being late 2013. What other politician could deliver such a perfectly vivid sporting analogy.

Can I tell you where the ball is now? I'm somewhere in the front forwards. It's a set-piece scrum and we've got the ball at our feet, driving for the line. The opposition is wheeling around pathetically, breaking the laws of the game. And we're going for a pushover try.

His commitment to the oval ball game is such that he decided to employ his rugger skills in a charity game against a German team in White Hart Lane. This could now serve as a metaphor for the brutally unsubtle way in which he has dismembered David Cameron's political career.

His attitude to soccer remains lukewarm. After watching Barcelona destroy Manchester United in the 2011 Champions League final, he suggested, after a brief natter with Bobby Charlton, that the beautiful game's snootiness towards the rough and tumble stuff has rendered it unsuitable to the English psyche.

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Johnson's romantic ardour for the 'agricultural' role of prop forward is in evidence in his strange love of Wales tight head Adam Jones. He has lovingly dubbed Jones 'Cro Magnon' man in honour of his distinctive appearance.

There is something about the shagged haired prop forward that gets Johnson's poetic juices flowing.

boris

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Here are some of his finest sporting moments:

Japanese kid

When confronted with a Japanese kid at a Rugby World Cup event, Johnson came over all Sean O'Brien and trampled the young lad under foot. That's the way to do it son! Take no prisoners.

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For some reason, BoJo felt compelled to apologise for this afterwards.

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Basketball shot

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Normally, we'd be inclined to wonder at how many takes this took but fair play to Boris, we know that if he failed miserably with the shot, then the media wouldn't be long seizing on it. He delivered under pressure.

Boris plays wheelchair rugby

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Boris's eight year spell as the Mayor of London seemed to consist entirely of photo and video opportunities like this. Here he was playing wheelchair rugby or 'muderball', as it is sometimes known,

Binding on tightly to the hooker

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Boris informed last year's Tory party conference, before which he had been forced to dodge the fruit tossed at him by the Corbynistas, that his happiest formative hours were spent straining and heaving away in the front row.

His primary role was to 'bind on tightly to the hooker', a practice which he has carried on into his post-rugby career.

A history lesson for the world's finest rugby players

Barney Ronay described the gathering of the world's finest rugby players as 'the largest amount of human neck ever gathered under this roof.'

Boris offered this history lesson to the world's rugby players, beginning with a band of drunken Victorians who were growing restless with the hostility to physical violence within the game of association football.

'...they had had enough of the namby, pamby pussyfooting around of the spheroid fetishists of association football and that it was time to codify a game that more closely resembled unarmed physical combat where it was a mark of honour to have your nose spread artistically across your left cheek and your ear like a cauliflour and where you would be actively congratulated and not penalised if you deliberately set out to knock your opponent over in the tackle.

And the classic...

It remains the finest piece of sporting brilliance we have ever witnessed from a politician, and we include the career of Jack Lynch in that.

Boris decided the Germans needed to be fixed with a couple of reducers.

He only did marginally less damage to the German than he and his acolytes have done to the British economy.

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