>> The Chris Hewett column
Rugby has a new law – as if the game needed another one – and the way things are going, it will soon carry the authority of an Eleventh Commandment:
“If Thou Makest A Mistake Live On Television, Thou Shalt Be Ritually Slaughtered On Twitter.”
The outpouring of bile on social media is no longer an occasional outrage. As Liam Williams, the excellent Wales full-back, discovered in the immediate aftermath of his country’s Six Nations defeat in Paris last weekend, it has become an inevitability.
Ten times out of nine and as night follows day, any error perpetrated on the international stage – off feet at a ruck and a yellow card of the “maybe, maybe not” variety, in Williams’ case – will result in orc-like legions of keyboard warriors casting four-lettered judgements from the comfort of their own unwashed Y-fronts.
It is almost too easy to suggest that these people would do the majority of us a favour by switching off their iPhones, grabbing their car keys and popping out for a drive instead – preferably into the nearest river. But rugby cannot stake any serious claim to the moral high ground until its own players learn to behave themselves on their journeys along the information superhighway.
Let us take as an example Tendai Mtawarira, the most decorated prop forward in the annals of South African rugby and a World Cup winner into the bargain. The “Beast” made 117 Test appearances for the Boks, which is a lot in anyone’s language, including the language of cyberspace. Until recently, it would have been close to a Tweet-full.
For those fortunate souls who missed it, Mtawarira took issue with Ellis Genge following the Ireland-England contest (for want of a better word) in Dublin, during which the Leicester loosehead appeared to rough up Jonathan Sexton on the floor.
“This Ellis Genge dude needs to be dealt with properly,” he wrote, adding two “emojis” – the first displaying a raised eyebrow, the second featuring blasts of steam from the nostrils. Brilliant. Full marks for artistic impression.
There are any number of points to be made about this incident, but as life is too short already, we’ll restrict ourselves to the obvious one. Mtawarira’s message being beyond pathetic, it is reasonable to wonder why a 35-yearold tight forward, who played an awful lot of rugby alongside such wellknown pacifists as Bakkies Botha and Eben Etzebeth, would feel the need to think like a street-corner bully, let alone talk like one in public.
Given his innate combustibility – he plays like Dylan Hartley on angry pills – you could get very long odds indeed on Genge remaining silent in
“This Ellis Genge dude needs to be dealt with properly,” - Mtawarira’s tweet to England prop
the face of such provocation. Sure enough, there was a response.
“I’ll let him know,” wrote the Englishman, thereby generating squillions of smiley-faced messages from online supporters labouring under the misapprehension that their man is the greatest comic genius since Peter Cook.
It is hardly the first time people playing an active role in the professional game – players, pundits, the odd coach – have chosen to wallow waist-deep in the Twitter cesspool. Before the home World Cup in 2015, the RFU felt the need to issue a 24point “social media guide” to those selected for the tournament, one of which warned that they would “end up looking foolish” if they engaged in inappropriate “banter”.
Six years on, that guide has gone the way of most Twickenham initiatives. If “Twitter spats”, to use the technical term, were once the exception rather than the rule, they are now on the brink of becoming compulsory.
Even in New Zealand, where the great Richie McCaw was renowned as a devout Twitter-sceptic during his long and wildly successful term of captaincy, there are concerns that the temptations of social media, some of them linked to financial returns, are turning too many heads on too regular a basis.
After the last World Cup, the first since 2011 that the All Blacks failed to win, a number of players were criticised, albeit by gentle implication, for spending too much time with their “likes”. They were not any old players, either. Among those identified were Richie Mo’unga, Beauden Barrett and Sevu Reece.
If Ellis Genge is wise, he will put a microchipped sock in it before he says something as career-damaging as it is daft. He may be a rare talent, blessed with levels of energy and physicality that raise him way above the norm, but it is difficult not to believe that off-field distractions have been a significant factor in his failure to oust a wrong-side-of-the-hill Mako Vunipola from the England front row.
As for Mtawarira, whose most recent rugby efforts were on behalf of the Old Glory club in Washington DC, he might usefully heed a few words of wisdom sometimes attributed to another man who spent time in the federal capital.
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” So said Abraham Lincoln. Or perhaps not, depending on your source. Only this is certain: whoever coined the phrase had it right.