"If Robbie lays an egg, I think he will be more surprised than any of us, so you should have no need to worry about that, Jaclyn."<br/><br/>"We have got professional teams in rugby union, rugby league and cricket as well as foorball."<br/><br/>"You can go back to the nineteenth century on this. Cricket coped with professional and amateur players in the same team, even though they might use different dressing rooms and keep their distance, but the southern amateurs who ran the Football Association and the Rugby Football Union were unwilling to allow the working class players from the north, who were increasingly dominating the sports, to be paid."<br/><br/>I draw a breath, and I am not mentioning the rugby codes' role in the second world war in Vichy France nor how  so much of this history is connected to the British class system.<br/><br/>"The FA capitulated and allowed professionalism, although there were competitions reserved for amateurs and some rebels who did not accept it. However, the RFU did not, and the leading northern clubs resigned to form the Northern Union which did allow professionalism, and later adopted different rules and became rugby league. Strangely, working class clubs from outside the north of England in south Wales and elsewhere were reluctant to join in, and rugby league has always struggled to get established outside its heartlands in parts of England, France, Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.<br/><br/>A hundred years later, rugby union finally allowed professionalism and allowed former league players to play union (until then former professionals were banned!).<br/><br/>One football club, Lewes, who were once my local club, play their male and female players the same, but there is a lot more interest in mens' than womens' football and the men are therefore paid more."<br/><br/>OOC Impressive for Bermuda. They have played in the Island Games against the likes of Guernsey in the past.