“Why don’t you come along next time,” he whispered with a conspiratorial smile, “go on – it’s easy.”"I may be skint but I’m not mad,” I replied.Over the space of the next four weeks, those restraining sticks of common sense, reason and naked fear were whittled away by a classic double act that I had previously been sheltered from: Poverty and Easy Money. I had reluctantly flown on to Hong Kong and found a job teaching English to Chinese children. The four walls of the office had created an environment in which the call of the wild was to become deafeningly loud. I handed in my resignation, bought myself a rucksack, went in search of adventure – and found far too much.After a six-month pub crawl from Australia to Thailand, my finances were exhausted. My head, heart and stomach, spasmed with the adrenalin overdose. The unthinkable had happened – we’d been caught smuggling gold.
It was April 1992. A year beforehand, I had been sitting at my desk in the City, trading futures and options with eight screens, two phones and a growing resentment.

Heads swivelled at the commotion and the crowded customs hall fell silent The four of us just stood there sweating and shaking. In what seemed like slow motion, a hand-held metal-detector was produced, flourished around the trembling Frenchman and .. went off like a car alarm. A pre-paid uniformed officer was awaiting our arrival and beckoned us over with a discreet nod. Sure enough, after a perfunctory bag check, he waved us through and the quadraphonic sigh of relief was almost audible.

Suddenly we heard shouting and turned to see a small, bespectacled man in plain clothes, running towards us gesticulating excitedly. As previously instructed, we made our way to gate 4 at Kathmandu airport and, behind the contrived nonchalance, began to experience unimaginable levels of fear, anxiety and adrenalin. An Englishman, Frenchman, Australian and American get off a plane and walk towards customs This is not a joke… “I have never known a situation where we are into April and still have no idea about our fixture list for next season,” one First Division club officer said yesterday.n Garin Jenkins, the Wales reserve hooker, said yesterday that he was considering an offer to join Bath, the English league leaders, from Swansea as an eventual successor to Graham Dawe.. The boycotters were then taken aback when Tony Hallett, the RFU secretary, insisted that television companies would negotiate only with the union.In fact the clubs have been in contact with broadcasters throughout the months of their protracted talks with the RFU and would anticipate being in a position to agree a TV deal there and then if the doomsday scenario came to pass and they fulfilled their ultimate threat of breaking away from the union.The uncertainty is creating additional strains within clubs already apprehensive about how they will finance professionalism if they are blocked from taking the lion’s share of TV revenue. Many of the major clubs regard Brittle, with his grass-roots constituency, as a prime obstacle to a settlement.All bar one of the top 20 had boycotted an RFU meeting at Twickenham that was finally attended only by members of the Third and Fourth Divisions plus London Scottish. Rugby Union

STEVE BALE
England’s leading clubs yesterday responded with dismay to the less emollient tone suddenly struck by the Rugby Football Union in their continuing debate about how club professionalism – now only five weeks away – is to be organised and controlled.No more meetings have yet been scheduled between the union and EPRUC, which represents the first two divisions, and the imminence of the end of the RFU’s professional moratorium is leading to gathering gloom about the prospects for resolving the situation.Yesterday EPRUC officials met but decided against making any statement in response to Sunday’s pointed insistence by Cliff Brittle, chairman of the RFU executive, that “the soul of rugby is not for sale”.

We will be running our own undercover operation this year to find the source of the tickets that end up on the black market. Tickets for this year’s final will remain at the same prices as the last two years, ranging from pounds 17 to pounds 60.. The Home Office has yet to publish prosecution and conviction figures.The FA said that it believes the new laws have helped but stresses that enforcement is the key. Demand for tickets for this year’s FA Cup final is likely to be intense.”We are sure the police and Government will continue to help us fight this scourge in sport,” the FA added.