Tomorrow is the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, an event made famous by Abba when they were looking for a word that would rhyme with "couldn't escape if I wanted to". It was also when the Duke of Wellington spoiled Napoleon's Eurovision ambitions.What is not always well known is that Wellington remarked afterwards that the battle had been won on the playing fields of Eton.What the duke, a miserable bloke, probably meant was that it was not all fun and games at school. It was all about preparing young men for war.And losing on the playing fields did not always mean losing on the battlefields.During the English summer of 1910, in one of the most famous cricket matches of all time, Eton beat rivals Harrow (Winston Churchill's old school) by nine runs after being asked to follow on 165 behind on the first innings.When the last Eton wicket fell, their lead was only 55, but their skipper, Robert St Leger Fowler, who had made 21 and 64, took eight for 23 to help dismiss Harrow for 45. The game is known as Fowler's Match.In the Harrow team was one HRGL Alexander, who took three for seven in Eton's first innings of 67. Thirty-two years later he was Bernard Montgomery's boss in World War2 and contributed - in a sort of cheerleading way - to hitting Rommel for a six at Alamein.The cricket metaphor was Monty's and the general would probably have agreed with Wellington's one about the playing fields.As for Fowler, he carried his sporting prowess (he was also the army's rackets champion) into war, winning a Military Cross in the defence of Amiens just four months before the end of World War1. He died in 1925, aged 34, of leukaemia.Happily, today we can prepare our youth on the fields for sport rather than war. And World Cups in particular.Sadly, the elation of playing sport - and I mean rugby - is drilled out of them soon after leaving the hallowed halls.The joy of watching a schools rugby game at, say, SACS, Bishops or Rondebosch on a Saturday morning often becomes drudgery when you walk down to Newlands for a provincial game in the evening.There you will find that the refreshing lack of inhibition, taking the ball to its lateral extremities, has been replaced by teams often coached by men bereft of ideas other than schwerpunkt tactics of setting up rucks and mauls in the face of perceived, but often non-existent, weak points.Okay, in senior rugby the defensive patterns have become so sophisticated (to the point at which they are mapped out in a "playbook") that an adventurous, free-spirited approach is regarded as the philosophy of rugby hippies.If so, peace brother, but I far more enjoyed Paul Roos Gymnasium winning what amounted to a World Cup for schoolboy rugby, beating Brisbane Boys College 35-3 in the final, than many Super 15 fixtures. They were in Japan, where the 2019 World Cup will be played.Hopefully, many of those Paul Roos boys, and others who delight us on Saturday mornings, will be in the green and gold by then. Along with a hippie coach...