Slimani’s coming back on again – and again
Cast your mind back a few weeks to the famous ‘fifth quarter’ played in the France v Wales Six Nations game.
With the Welsh camped on their own line, there was a succession of 5m scrums, and at one point the French doctor adjudged that the prop, Uini Atonio, needed to be replaced for an HIA, and he was replaced by France’s best scrummager, Rabah Slimani. The problem was that Slimani was a starter, but had been replaced for tactical reasons earlier in the game.
He could come back on only under certain circumstances: to replace a front-row player who was injured, or as a blood or HIA replacement. He could not come back on for tactical reasons, and the under-pressure Welsh head coach Rob Howley felt that is what had happened. Amazingly, the affair is still rumbling on, with the Six Nations nattily-named Untoward Incident Review Group still contemplating what, if anything, to do about it.
Last weekend’s Challenge Cup final between Gloucester and Stade Francais will surely have given them some more food for thought, because there was an almost identical repeat, with Slimani once again involved. No-one is likely to ask who ate all the pies as long as Slimani’s on the pitch. He’s a seriously big unit, and a very destructive, if borderline legal, scrummager, who it seems probably can’t play the full 80 minutes without a breather.
When he played against the Ospreys he went off after 41 minutes, but came back for the final eight minutes of the game, and similar things have happened in the Top14 on at least a couple of occasions. Now, it may be that these situations were enforced by injury or the need for an HIA, but the Gloucester one looked a bit dodgy, and the BT commentators spot- ted it. When Slimani was replaced at half-time, they joked that we might yet see him again, and when he later hopped onto the exercise bike to warm up, they spent a while focusing on him. Sure enough, on 68 minutes Heinke Van der Merwe sustained the sort of blood injury you might get shaving, but a sizeable bandage was applied!
Refs are over a barrel on this one: such is the obsession with player welfare that no-one will question whether a replacement is required or justified. That said, just because it’s difficult it doesn’t mean that World Rugby can duck out of tackling the current unsatisfactory situation. The current Law is being abused and it needs to be addressed.
Willie-John McBride is rugby’s equivalent of royalty, but his reported comments about English clubs potentially killing the Lions are best described as odd. He said that he would ‘hate to see a time when the English clubs do not allow their players to represent the Lions’, a view that I suspect is shared by everyone, including the English clubs’ owners.
He expressed the view that all Lions tours should be at least 12 games long, to allow the players to bond – that just isn’t going to happen.
There’s a generation gap on show here, and WillieJohn is representing an opinion that is from the past – it’s 46 years since he captained the Lions side that won in New Zealand. The game was still amateur, the players were treated like serfs unless they’d been to the right school, Ted Heath was Prime Minister, there was no satellite TV – it was a very different world.
Since then the game has changed in so many ways, and some things have had to give. I don’t know where the Lions tours fit into the modern players’ priorities, and I’m certain it varies by country, but it’s different from Willie-John’s day.
Is a Lions touring spot a bigger achievement than winning the Champions Cup or the Aviva Premiership alongside your mates? One’s the icing on the cake, and the other is the verywell-paid day job.
The perception of the Lions is different in the PRO 12 nations – their league has a much lower profile.
The standard of club rugby has gone through the roof since WillieJohn’s day, as the recent Saracens v Clermont European final showed. How would that Saracens team fare if it competed in the Six Nations, or took on the Lions? My money would be them surprising at least a couple of international sides, and while I reckon the Lions would prevail, I suspect it would be far from a rout.