We in the North think we have the measure of the Union Man. Range rover, driving gloves, Top Gear fan, thinks Clarkson talks "bloody good sense", tempted by Ukip, tankard behind the bar and a pint before lunch on a Sunday. This is a veritable tsunami of sweeping generalisation of course, smacking of trollish, smouldering resentment. But more expert minds than I have unearthed smoking guns and paper trails revealing Blatter-ish skulduggery down the years from the Union camp. George Clarke claimed recently in the New Statesman that the Nazis persuaded the Vichy government to outlaw rugby league; since then, union dignitaries have deliberately stifled league’s growth in Japan, Serbia, South Africa and Italy. And there's the case of Cambridge student Ady Spencer, who was banned by the RFU from playing in the 1994 Varsity Rugby Union match because he’d played league as youngster in his native Warrington (the incident travelled all the way to Parliament, where it was condemned as “injustice and interference with human rights”).