Next time, I'm bringing a cannon.

As the alien being landed he or she or it (lets give the alien being a name as any sensible human being would – and how about Dinges) was witness to the oddest sight: thousands upon thousands, Dinges could not, even with a much larger brain, count how many, were staring at 30 men all chasing after a strangely shaped object.

In fact, as Dinges would later learn, millions upon millions living as far away as two islands called New Zealand stared at rectangular shaped image-producing machines called televisions with the same level of interest as those at Newlands Stadium, as the place was called where Dinges first landed.

How is it possible, Dinges wondered, that 30 large men wearing odd coverings called clothes chasing after a rocket shaped object made from animal skin could hold the attention of so many human beings simultaneously? Indeed, not only hold their attention, but had them make their bodies and faces twist into such strange contortions?

The men had the power to make them utter elevated sounds called screaming. It made them utter other sounds called cheering and then there were calling, shouting, whistling and yes laughing. When half the men did one thing, the beings in New Zealand and a place called Australia laughed a lot and the beings in South Africa cried.

When the men dressed in green and gold managed to get close to the line where two poles stood erect, the human beings in South Africa held their breath with such intensity Dinges could hear and feel their deepest expectation, but the poor chaps were never able to provide relief by getting one of them to press the ball on the grass.

Dinges had a brain that evolved in the cosmos and, as a result, it could understand infinity or endlessness. [Parenthetically, I say it because in Dinges’ world there were four sexes. Dinges discovered that on Earth, there were unisex beings that would self-fertilise and species, like human beings, with two sexes.]

Dinges’ brain could not comprehend how this game called rugby could lift or depress the spirit of so many human beings scattered across Earth. Why had the 1 hour and 40 minutes, their units of counting time, of intense physical activity that had the utterly inconsequential goal of putting down leather to grass, had such monumental power?

Dinges had, of course, missed the first clue to the mystery, which is a piece of menacing theatrical dance they called the Haka. Apparently it is a word from the indigenous people of New Zealand called the Maoris but it also apparently had a resonance with a language in South Africa called Afrikaans, for to hak is to hook, a move in rugby.

Dinges learnt that the Haka was a sanitised and modern choreographed version of a war dance, something these beings did before before they went off to do kill one another. Dinges learnt too that they only did this Haka thing when they went to war as a group; Haka was not for individual murder, it was for group murder.

Dinges had to get over the fact that these human beings killed one another. In fact, they have been staggering episodes in what they call history (itstory?) of one group of human beings killing a whole group of other of their species’ members and with calculated deliberateness. This was utterly foreign in Dinges’ world.

Dinges started to think that it was beginning to learn something fundamental about this human world when it discovered that group murder actually had rules and in fact was called war when it did! War seemed to be an OK thing because it had it rules that applied to everyone participating in group murder.

So, Dinges was on to something when it concluded that rugby was the play-acting of war, a good thing Dinges supposed, as it replaced the act of doing such a stupid thing as killing one another. Dinges was terrified by the inescapable conclusion that had to be drawn, which was that the screaming, jeering, laughter and despair of that day, the elevation and depression of the soul of all these beings, were simply the biochemistry of a species that enjoyed war-making and something called victory. Dinges left Earth hoping deep in his heart that these human beings would play more organised games, for it was surely better than the real thing.