Tethered Ryno has time for a rethink

YOU can do quite a lot in 12 weeks: walk the full length of the South West Coast Path without killing yourself, for instance, or master the fundamentals of a foreign language, as long as it’s not Mandarin.

If you’re as clever as the great cricket writer and political philosopher CLR James, you might even sit down and write something as substantial as World Revolution from first capital letter to final full stop, as he did after hiring a room in a Brighton boarding house in 1938.

In all likelihood, the South African lock Ryno Pieterse will do none of these things during his enforced three-month break from rugby. He’ll be too busy pondering the error of his ways.

The first of which has little to do with the “tackle”, for want of a better word, he inflicted on the Bordeaux scrumhalf Maxime Lucu while playing for Castres in a Top 14 match last month. Grim as it was, it was neither the highest nor the latest of illegal hits and did not justify the overblown reaction online. As if anything ever does.

Far worse was Pieterse’s lack of concern for Lucu. After dusting himself down from the fake fight that followed the incident with the inevitability of night following day and receiving the obligatory red card from the referee Romain Poite, he left the field without a single glance at the man he had just horizontalized, let alone a check on his condition and offer a heartfelt apology.

Pieterse hails from Mpumalanga, where aggressive second-row forwards are deeply rooted in the rugby community, as Doddie Weir discovered to his cost during the Lions tour of 1997.

As club rugby in France is not an outpost of pacifism either, he is likely to return with most of his rough edges intact.

But it would be nice to think he will learn some sort of lesson during his absence, all the same.