Monday 13 February 2017

The wrong shaped ball

Which sporting competition has the highest average live attendances in the world? Well, it's happening now: the Six Nations rugby. This weekend's Wales-England match was a great spectacle and a close finish, even if it wasn't perhaps the highest quality match and decided by, well, decision making. I'm left wondering why on earth Wales didn't kick for goal when they had 2 penalty opportunities when losing 8-3 early in the match. No need to panic with three-quarters of the game to go, surely? Noticeably England did kick for goal in a similar position to narrow the Welsh lead to 2 points with about 10 minutes to go and exert pressure. And also why Wales slung the ball to a left footer on the left of the pitch with a couple of minutes to go: the normally immaculate Jonathan Davies missed touch by so far that it looked as if he meant to lump it straight down George Ford's throat in the middle of the pitch. Without these three kicking faux pas, Wales might have won by eight points instead of losing by five. T-CUP Sir Clive Woodward used to call it - Thinking Correctly Under Pressure. That would be the same Clive Woodward whose England players said of him "his indecision is final". Before they won the World Cup, of course.

Ford slung the ball to Farrell - for me England's most consistent player over the last 4 years - why on earth did it take so long for rugby purists to warm to him? (Possibly because his dad made his name playing Rugby League?). Farrell's superb pass released Daly who did what wingers do and made for the corner. Now I know it was late in the game, but why on earth was Alex Cuthbert left isolated against Daly? Why didn't another Welsh player make straight for the corner? After all, in soccer, you "show" the winger the outside, to encourage him to go away from goal. Surely in rugby you show him the inside - if he turns that way there's a whole posse waiting to tackle him. Curious. But a grandstand finish, if bitter for Wales. England's winning run is now 16 matches - the international record (among the "top" nations) is 18 and the record for consecutive matches unbeaten is 23.

You can tell I quite like rugby now, but I hated it at school, which was a missed opportunity. It wasn't taught well (taught at all really) but I wasn't mentally or physically ready for it. 15 years later, after I'd toughened up a bit playing in men's football (VERY different from the school and university game!)  I realised I could have enjoyed rugby a lot. I would have a lot of helpful suggestions for my old school PE department about how rugby should have been taught to 11 year olds with no experience of the game if I had a Tardis to hand.

But one of the things I really don't get about rugby is the way most people seem to think it's a more honest sport than soccer.

One of the things I hated at age 11, as just about the smallest boy in the class, was the deliberate late tackle. You offload the ball and some galoot takes the opportunity to flatten you when they could easily pull out. Just like Wales's aptly named Moriarty (who had a great match) did to England's Owen Farrell on Saturday. Not a word from the referee despite the tackle seeming so late you needed a calendar not a clock to measure by how much. To be fair, Farrell got up (slowly) with a wry grin and got on with it, which tends not to happen in soccer. But that's because the late hit has always been 'part of the game' in rugby. At school in the 60s I felt a victim and considered it a form of bullying. I don't feel any differently now. It put me off the game for 20 years.

I can remember playing full back (I'm talking proper football now) on a wet winter's day in the glorious heights of the Warrington and District League circa 1980 and running flat out with the winger for a ball rolling diagonally towards the touch line half way in my own half. The ball was not quite going to carry out of play. Get there first and it's out for a throw in, go to ground but let him get it and and he's away. Hesitate and he's away anyway. We got there together and I took the ball and the man with my best ever sliding tackle. We ended up in a heap several yards off the pitch, got up and got on with it, as rugby players do. I don't remember the game getting easier after that, but obviously it did as the ref came up to me at half time (orange squash on the pitch, nothing fancy for us) and said "great tackle, he's not come anywhere near you after that". The point of the story is that, if I'd been just a fraction late, given the strength of the challenge, there would have been an enormous row with players piling in, lots of pushing and shoving, many angry words and me quite likely getting my marching orders. I knew when I went in for the ball that the tackle just had to be timed perfectly.

People will say you couldn't apply that in rugby, though I'm not sure I fully appreciate why there should be such a difference between hitting someone in rugby after the ball has been offloaded from football after the ball has been laid off. And I realise rugby does penalise very late tackles, but there is still plenty of scope for hitting the man regardless. It might be sport but it's not sporting to me when there's no attempt to pull out.

Rugby has cleaned its act up a bit, since the dropping of someone on their head or neck in a tackle was clamped down on. I still don't understand why there wasn't more outrage at the "spear tackle" the two All Blacks Keven Mealamu and Tana Umaga cynically used to put Ireland's Brian O'Driscoll out of the Lions tour in 2005. He was lucky it was only that - for me this was a deliberate, co-ordinated and blatant attempt to injure a player. It should never have been called a tackle as the ball was nowhere near - the two All Blacks picked up O'Driscoll from a ruck, flipped him over and drove him down and into the turf. O'Driscoll was fortunate to "only" dislocate his shoulder: his neck could easily have been broken. Totally beyond the pale even in tag wrestling and not something you could ever see in soccer: even if you set out to deliberately hurt someone in the round ball game it wouldn't actually be easy to do it, let alone do it without sanction. Whereas in rugby - well a work colleague who played schoolboy rugby union and league to a decent level told me a stack full of tricks short of spear tackles that were normal practice. His favourite was dropping on his knees with full weight onto the back of an opposing player who was diving to score a try. "Makes them a lot less likely to do it again and you never get caught". As for Mealamu and Umaga, the rugby authorities took no retrospective action against them and the New Zealand camp swore All Black was All White. They accused Woodward of trying to deflect attention from his team's defeat in the match when he raised the issue after the match. Umaga branded O'Driscoll a "sook", slang for cry baby, and he claimed he was victimised in the media, saying in his book "The sustained personal attack they (the Lions) launched against me was hard to believe and even harder to stomach. You don't want to take it personally but it's almost impossible not to when another player, a guy you had some respect for, attacks your character in the most direct and damning terms." I've read many self serving statements by sportsmen who should have held their hands up and accepted they were wrong but this one takes the biscuit for being the most..... sorry, but the only word I can summon up is cretinous. If you don't know what I'm on about, watch the video for yourself (there's a link below). I don't know about the law of New Zealand, but in the UK I would have thought a charge of assault could have been successful. Either way, it makes anything you've seen on a soccer pitch look very tame.

Ah, but what about cynical play I hear you say? Footballers are divers and cheats! I give you what rugby folk call the "dark arts" of the scrum. England's Neil Back was widely admired by pundits and players for his mastery of being able to get away with living on the edge of the rules (usually just the wrong side, but getting away with it). In other words, cheating. The blurb on Back's own book describes him as an "anti-hero". Back retired a few years ago but the dark arts live on, well described by Will Greenwood in the Telegraph last autumn*. Lots of tricks aimed at hoodwinking the referee and winning penalties rather than getting on with the game, including the scrum half's version of "going down easily" and many variants on winning penalties and getting the other team's players into trouble with the referee.

Yes, they all talk to the referee politely - which I commend. In said Warrington League back in the day swearing at the referee meant immediate dismissal, as it should. The behaviour of Premier League players towards the referee has been a big irritant for me for many years. To my pleasant surprise, the Premier League has actually rolled it back a bit - since warnings a couple of years ago refs have been tougher on dissent and you don't see the likes of Wayne Rooney screaming in their faces as much of late.

But, however you address the referee ("ref" in football, "sir" in rugby), has there ever been anything in soccer as remarkable as rugby's "bloodgate" in 2009, when a Harlequins player bit into a blood capsule to feign injury, allowing the Quins main kicker, who had gone off injured, to come back on in the final minutes of a key cup tie. (I think the point was that the kicker couldn't run, but his stand in wasn't doing well and the scores were very close going into the final minutes. Presumably the main kicker could hobble about and be available to take a kick if needed, though in practice there was no further scoring). It turned out Quins had pulled this prank more than once before. Their director of rugby, Dean Richards (not exactly a non-entity - he played over 50 times for England and the British Lions) was given a three year ban and the club fined £260,000. Now this escapade got a lot of publicity but can you imagine the media frenzy if it had been in a top class soccer match? Isn't that the real point: soccer is front and back page news, rugby mainly just back page and that colours perceptions.

So I just will not accept that rugby is an inherently more decent game, played by tough sporting fellows who are all chums afterwards (as if that isn't ever the case in soccer - trust me, it was most of the time). A good proportion of the players on any pitch in either sport will push the limits on what they can get away with to try to win. But I will enjoy watching the Six Nations and hope for lots of good (and fair) action. Maybe we'll get to see a straight put in at a scrum just once? No, I agree, that would be too much to hope for. But they don't cheat or use gamesmanship, so all scrum halves must all have one arm longer than the other, I suppose.


*http://www.telegraph.co.uk/rugby-union/2016/10/08/referees-need-to-wise-up-to-the-scrummaging-dark-art-that-has-in/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/rugbyunion/european-rugby/11276718/Bloodgate-How-the-scandal-unfolded-when-Harlequins-met-Leinster-in-April-2009.html

You can read about the O'Driscoll assault and see a video clip at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=11471681







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