Constant online anger threatens to overwhelm thrills on the rugby pitch

Welcome to The Breakdown, the Guardian’s weekly (and free) rugby union newsletter. Here’s an extract from this week’s edition. To receive the full version every Tuesday, just pop your email in below:

Sport brings out the best and worst in us. The same occasionally applies to sportswriting. One minute it is all breathless hyperbole, florid adjectives and poetic descriptions of the best days of our lives. The next it is curtains for some ashen-faced manager and the purple prose turns to acid rain. One day you’re a rooster, as the ex-Wallaby rugby coach Alan Jones used to say, the next you’re a feather duster.

More recently social media has picked up this ancient art form and run off with it like a demented William Webb Ellis. Nick Kyrgios looks an angry man at Wimbledon but he has nothing on some of the Twitter loons howling at this week’s chosen moon. Which may explain why elite sport in general seems to be becoming more shouty by the week.

The aforementioned Kyrgios is merely the most prominent example, someone who sees no problem in behaving like a complete arse in his place of work because, as he modestly told the Wimbledon chair umpire, “people want to see me, not you”. Goodness, what a caring, thoughtful guy he sounds. The former Australian grand slam legends such as Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall must be bursting with pride.

But to some extent he is just another reflection of our hair-trigger times. And if he really fancies getting annoyed, he should watch some rugby union. No other ball game – not even politically riven, cash-bloated golf – currently feels more fractious. To some extent that is OK because contact sports are not meant to be pat-a-cake or bland but the naturally occurring “edge” that makes rugby