Captain Crap: Stephen Jones. His Welsh team-mates gave him the nickname in 2007 when he took over the captaincy and lost about seven on the trot. Also goes by ‘Wellies’ because he looks like he’s wearing wellies when he’s running. 

Chairman of the Board: Ronan O’Gara. Self-explanatory: the links to dodgy financiers,  the numerous ‘retirements’ etc. More to the point, Old Blue Eyes was a manipulative weakling with a mean streak a mile wide who loved the ponies too!

Charlie Hodgepodge: Charlie Hodgson. Serial mixed-performer at every scale – within games, on a game-by-game basis, on a season-by-season basis. Very talented, but has struggled in the past with different aspects of his game: confidence, tackling, place-kicking. Good attacker, though. Could yet be first-choice English outhalf, even if Lancaster’s yoof drive comes to pass.

Chunky Willem Alberts: He’s a big chunky sort of a chap. If he was a Yank, he’d be described as ‘husky’.

Cowpoke: David Pocock. This one is one of ours. Bit of syllabic reversal going, bit of an A-B-B-A internal scheme – Cowpoke/Pocock. Plus he used to be a farmer back when he was growing up in Zimbabwe and slept with a gun under his pillow. He’s a rugged type of a character, deserves a good nickname that isn’t too laudatory.

Crazy Piet: Pieter de Villiers. He’s fucking mental.

Cuddly Warren Gatland: He looks like a big teddy bear.

Curly Bill: Kurtley Beale. Sort of named after Curly Bill Brocius, the unpredictable Cochise Territory outlaw who feuded with Wyatt Earp and his brothers. It also just sounds like Kurtley Beale. Eh, that’s where it actually came from.

Danny Cipriani Who Slept With A Man: Thank you, Simon Shaw

Deep-fried Irn Bru: If Edinburgh rugby is populated by Alasdairs, Glasgow will never be able to throw off the reputation of being a desperate hole full of rickets-having, Tennants-drinking, Gorbals-dwelling criminals. Other teams have Powerade, these lads have Irn Bru. Even the water in it is artificial. In the words of Glasgow’s most famous son: “Hehfukyoo”.

Delon ‘Felon’ Armitage: One of the dirtiest players in professional rugby. Redeeming characteristics? Not too many. Scratch that: none.

Demon Headmaster: Graham Henry. Another one of ours – and a pretty good one if we say so ourselves [shines nails on lapel like Zac Morris from Saved By The Bell]. Named after the series of books by Gillian Cross from wor misspent yoof.

Dexy’s Midnight Rugby Correspondent: Gerry Thornley. The scarves. The perm. The ‘designer stubble’. The joie de vivre. The whiff of cordite in the air.

Dingo Deans: Robbie Deans. Not ours. Quite good though. I think it’s a of NZ origin and is supposed to be pretty derogatory, i.e. dingos are scavengers who nose around roadkill and [famously] steal babies.

Dirty Leeds: Munster, generally. We’re a bit cavalier with this one, throw it around quite a lot. Actually stolen from Tim Lovejoy-era Soccer A.M., but where they only had the imagination to append it to the actual Leeds team, we go one step further and bend the meme to suit any dirty team. That’s called the information age, baby.

We should just stick to Munster with it though, they fit the Revie’s Leeds mould better than anybody else. Dirty Leeds!

Dirty Rat Bastard: Quade Cooper. Not either our most imaginative or most decent nickname, but he looks like a rat. If he was a really nice chap in the mould of predecessors Bernie Larkham or Michael Lynagh, we’d probably call him “Ratty”, after Mr Rat in The Wind in the Willows. He’s actually more like one of the wicked weasels who lives in Wild Wood, the dirty blighter.

DJ Church: Cian Healy’s DJ soubriquet. His nom de wax, if you will. Apparently comes from CH-U-R-CH, i.e. Cian Healy, You Are Cian Healy. Text-speak. Well done Belvedere College, glad to see that Mr and Mrs Healy’s several grand a term went to good use. Generations of Jesuits are spinning in their graves.

Doctor Phil: Felipe Contepomi. Not ours, and not a particularly good nickname. I get that Contepomi is a doctor and that you could Anglicise his name to Philip and then shorten it to Phil to compare him to a drastically overweight TV psychiatrist, but it’s not a particularly apt – or flattering – comparison. For one thing, everybody in Leinster called him Felipe, they didn’t go down the Munster shtick route:“Let’s call Lifeimi Mafi ‘Larry Murphy’ because it’ll show how we’ve embraced him as one of our own [until somebody realises that he’s nicknamed after the most infamous rapist in the country]”. So the ‘Phil’ moniker doesn’t stick. For another thing, the odious Doctor Phil was – for all his faults – relatively level-headed, while Contepomi is a raving loolah.

Dour Arm Wrestle In the Rain – Just What Both Teams Wanted: We only used this once, and it was to describe the game between Scotland and Georgia in RWC11. This should probably go at the bottom of every Scottish international report we do: even if it’s only half true, the half that is true is the truest thing in the world.

Dumper McGahan: Tony McGahan, Munster coach. Scapegoat for irate locals who have grown accustomed to the success afforded by a once-in-a-generation ten-man-rugby team over the last decade.

Dwarf-tossing: One of the tags that we appended to most posts regarding the English team over RWC11. These things have a certain life of their own.