I used to cheat but now it is getting totally out of hand

Underhand antics have always been around but this epidemic is serious

If I could have one wish for 2018 it would be to turn back the tide of the petty cheating that is threatening to engulf the game. Cheating has always gone on in rugby. Every breakdown is an illegal contest of slowing the ball down versus smashing the defenders off by any means necessary. I cheated every week. The difference was that I cheated to win a massive battle in order to get the victory. Now we are seeing cheating taking place over the smallest battles, most often to get a fellow professional into trouble.

We saw another example last week when Worcester beat London Irish. Donncha O’callaghan yanked on the hair of Saia Fainga’a, the London Irish hooker. Fainga’a gave him an open-handed slap, to which O’callaghan responded as if he had been dropped by a Mike Tyson uppercut.

A few weeks before that Remi Tales did the same thing in the Champions Cup for Racing 92 after Ellis Genge made slight contact with his throat. Tales rolled around on the floor until the referee awarded a penalty and then sprang up right as rain.

The amount of backchat towards referees has gone through the roof. We have even seen the start of players waving imaginary cards to the referee.

I have no doubt the players’ psyche is changing. The removal of the old-school self-policing means that players feel more vulnerable and less able to influence something that is going wrong. If someone is getting away with murder off the ball, you cannot take him out.

That is why you start looking to win those small niggly battles. It is what footballers have been doing for years by stealing five yards at a throw-in and running into the penalty area looking for the slightest contact. Pundits do not even condemn a player for diving; he has been clever if he draws contact.

Priorities are changing within rugby. Winning a penalty has become an end in itself. When an opposition player is on your side of the ruck, you used to be taught to clear them out of the way as quickly as possible to get quick ball for your scrum-half. Now you are more likely to see that player held in place to milk the penalty. Same when you have a scrum on the halfway line, probably the best attacking position you get on the pitch, which is instead used to con the referee to gain a penalty.

That mentality is drifting from the pitch to the stands. Fans are now aware of the influence they can have on a referee or television match official. Whenever there is an opposition try involving any sort of flat pass, the home crowd will bay that it was forward.

Probably the worst culprits in all this are the French television directors. I have been astonished at how they manipulate their position to help the French sides. When working in France, we receive the feed from the French television station. If something happens in the game, the producer or commentator will ask for a replay. Say there is an incident that could go against the French team, the French director simply will not show any replays. If a request comes in, he will do the old Gallic shrug and say they don’t have it. It is something that European Professional Club Rugby should look at.

So you have cheating on the pitch, in the stands and in the television gantry. The common theme is how the referees have been depowered. The introduction of the TMO has robbed referees of the confidence to officiate what they see. It is almost guaranteed that a losing director of rugby will reference all the decisions that went against them. Isn’t it funny that they never mention the breaks that went their way?

Everyone within rugby makes mistakes yet it seems that only referees are not allowed to make the slightest error. It has become a horrible job. You have to be a big character like Wayne Barnes or Nigel Owens to retain that autonomy to play what you see.

I would love to see more enforcement of the 10-metre rule for backchat. Any card-waving or play-acting should result in a reversing of the decision or even retrospective punishment. Football finally has a mechanism for dealing with divers. My fear is that in rugby the genie is also out of the bottle.