Frank Keating remember's England's most exotic player, Prince Alexander Obolensky in The Guardian
"Red roses for a white Russian. Crimson blooms of English rugby's traditional floral emblem will this weekend begin to be strewn on or around the imposing new statue in Ipswich's Cromwell Square. Last Saturday evening in Paris, romantics could be forgiven for imagining the England rugby team's sudden invigorating try out of the blue and down the left touchline could itself have been an emphatically colourful stroke of remembrance in apt commemoration of the notable imminent jubilee.
"Hail to the Prince. Three-score-and-10. Monday 29 March is the 70th anniversary of the death, at just 24, of (still) England's most exotic, outlandish and, you could say, treasured rugby footballer.
"Prince Alexander Obolensky, son of an officer in Tsar Nicholas's Imperial Horse Guard, was sent to Britain as a toddler to escape the Revolution. At Trent College he made a mark in the Midlands as a schoolboy sprinter. At Brasenose he won the first of his two Oxford Blues in 1935, ever intriguing the gossip columns by the variety and dazzle of society girls on his arm as well as his habit of gaily downing champagne and a dozen oysters before Oxford's matches. On the field, "he glides with the easy sinuosity of an antelope at full speed", wrote leading sportswriter EHD Sewell."
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