CHRIS HEWETT
Simplify the game and show more consistency around illegal tackles
Purity and simplicity are not among the nouns most commonly associated with Rugby Union in its current state of confusion: prop forwards were routinely described as “simple” back in the day, but that was a different thing altogether.
So we must find our sporting Edens where we can. The best place right now? Tokyo.
A few hours after the Lions’ victory over the Springboks in the Test series opener in Cape Town, a low-profile Austrian cyclist by the name of Anna Kiesenhofer – a rider without a professional contract, it should be emphasised – won the Olympic Women’s Road Race by riding away from the full-time professionals in the opening moments and remaining in a different postcode for the next four hours.
None of the favourites noticed until it was too late. Indeed, the silver medallist and pre-race favourite, Annemiek van Vleuten of the Netherlands, didn’t notice at all. When she crossed the line second, Van Vleuten assumed she was first and celebrated accordingly. Oops.
This kind of thing happens when robo-minded sportspeople are stripped of the technological support on which they have come to depend – there was no in-race radio communication system, in this case – and are suddenly left to work things out on their Jack Joneses.
If Van Vleuten fell short on that score, Kiesenhofer was just about the last person on earth to mess up the calculations. She does, after all, hold a PhD and a post-doctoral fellowship in mathematical physics.
“In the most important race, you’re not allowed to ride with communication,” said the silver medallist, through gritted teeth. “It should have made the race more interesting, but instead it made it more confusing.”
Confusing? For her maybe, but not for us. The performance of Van Vleuten and her teammates was an object lesson in game unawareness, while Kiesenhofer’s was an expression of individual initiative – a one-woman stand against the forces of micro-managed uniformity and machine-tooled precision that, left unchecked, will surely destroy the essence of sport.
There are still hints of the Kiesenhofer spirit in the Union code: Harlequins showed traces of it in their exhilarating charge towards the last season’s Premiership title. But it is a dwindling resource and World Rugby, the non-governing governing body, is doing little to replenish it.
Everywhere the organisation turns on the techno-front, it runs into at least one unintended consequence and sometimes dozens of them. The game clock has given us the miserable anti-climax of the trundle-turn-release-repeat tactic, while the Television Match Official review system is a parody of itself.
If you require proof, that opening Cape Town Test provided enough evidence to make the average Royal Commission look like a kangaroo court. From Willie le Roux’s disallowed try to Hamish Watson’s spatchcocking of the same South African full-back, clarity was conspicuous by its absence.
Between them, the Australia referee Nic Berry and the TMO “homer” Marius Jonker (who turned out to be anything but) ripped up the agreed protocols in the first incident. Berry’s on-field call in favour of Le Roux’s try left Jonker to find a cast-iron cause for reversal. Which he didn’t. Outcome? No try. You know it makes sense.
As for Watson, the officials spent a good deal of time – it felt like a week – attempting to deconstruct the flanker’s highly questionable manhandling of Le Roux. What was the impact of the contact, the angle of the dangle, the intention behind the hyperextension, the velocity of (as South African observers saw it) the atrocity?
No one seemed to have much idea. Where was Kiesenhofer when we needed her? Her mastery of non-linear partial differential equations would have been no end of help.
Moving further afield, the recent Marika Koroibete pantomime was as daft as it gets. Having clattered the French flanker and part-time actor Anthony Jelonch, rugby’s Gerard Depardieu, with precisely the kind of tackle World Rugby wants to eradicate, the Wallaby wing was declared innocent. Despite pleading guilty. Yes, really.
Colin Boag had it right in these pages last week: the only consistent aspect of the current techno-aided disciplinary system is its inconsistency. Would we have seen the same outcome had Koroibete been a Fijian wing playing for Fiji rather than a Fijian wing playing for Australia? Answers on a postcard addressed to Planet Zog, where World Rugby has its head office.
Rugby Union will never be easily understood by the proverbial visitor from outer space.
Much of the important action is hidden from view – scrum, maul, tackle area – and some of the stuff conducted in the public eye passeth all understanding, even by those who are paid to understand it. Just lately, health and safety imperatives have made the game more bewildering still.
But at the very least, we expect the people making and administering the rules to agree both on what constitutes a legal tackle and what should happen to a player who transgresses, irrespective of whether the victim remains in one piece.
The sport requires simplifying. It needs to find itself a Kiesenhofer – someone prepared to get out in front of events and stay there. For all our sakes.
“The Television Match Official review system is a parody of itself”