Rugby’s ills typified in Marler case

AS stout-hearted rugby men belted out arguments in the Joe Marler case, a marvellous line of PG Wodehouse came to mind.

He described the aunts of Bertie Wooster calling to each other ‘like mastodons bellowing across a primordial swamp’.

There has been the sense of loud and prehistoric stupidity about this disgraceful drama, too. If the decision to find Marler had no case to answer was shocking, the attempt of Warren Gatland to tidy the controversy away by dismissing it as banter was pathetic.

Eddie Jones, fast becoming the Bart Simpson of the Six Nations with his penchant for attention-grabbing, then chided the Welsh union for reacting with alarm to a finding that meant an opponent could call their player Samson Lee ‘a gypsy’ and there would be no consequences.

Too often this season rugby has been exposed as harbouring attitudes that can most charitably be described as dumb and dated, on issues ranging from concussion to national representation. Racism is a slump towards more dangerous territory, and the risible response of the Six Nations disciplinary machinery to the Marler case indicts administrators, but also exposed alarming ignorance, not least in Gatland.

The failure to deal with Marler is implicitly acknowledged by the call for clarification from World Rugby, but even if Marler is eventually punished – as he should be, heavily – the affair has done more damage to a sport that is staggering from controversy to controversy and finding direction from figures, who should know better, hard to come by.