MARTIN SAMUEL’S VERDICT:
At the low-rise modern offices of New Zealand Rugby on Molesworth Street, in the Wellington suburb of thornton, the judicial panel debated until close to midnight.
Sonny Bill Williams was already gone from the series, after three hours of deliberation, even for a plea of guilty. the All Blacks will be without their most brilliantly imaginative player for the series decider against the British and Irish Lions on Saturday.
Now it was Sean O’Brien’s turn. Footage was replayed and reviewed, representations made and considered. the Lions legal officer, Max Ruthie of Bird & Bird, was present, as he was for the tour of Australia in 2013. Citings are a serious business these days. the Lions travel, as the Americans would say, lawyered up.
It took a further four hours before the verdict arrived: case dismissed. A rugby incident, the panel decided, and everyone knew what they meant.
that rugby is a sport in which big boys take big hits and there has got to be a margin for error or just old fashioned bad luck with collisions so fast and furious.
It would have been monstrously unfair had the tourists lost their best player of the series over what looked a complete accident.
there is no escaping that damage was done to New Zealand wing Waisake Naholo by O’Brien’s forearm, but the panel — like most eye witnesses — decided it was more misfortune than maliciousness or even recklessness.
O’Brien did not plead guilty as Williams did. he would have considered himself dreadfully unlucky to be banned. Yet does that mean the citing was a waste of time? No. In the present climate, rugby cannot be too careful.
the sport only has a future if it demonstrates best practice and a duty of care. Rugby needs its police, its red cards, its buzz killers, as the old guard might have it. If it takes a panel until the next morning to clear a player, so be it. If the marquee fixture of this rugby year goes ahead without its most exciting player in Williams, that’s how it must be.
the sport cannot afford to take so much as one step backwards. And here’s a reminder of why.
Let’s rewind to the famous Lions tour from 1971, the one many consider the greatest Lions tour there has been; a 2-1 series victory in a four-test series in New Zealand. this is how rugby was and why rugby had to change.
the tour is now the subject of an excellent book called When Lions
Roared, by tom english and Peter Burns. It is full of frank and revealing personal accounts from the participants.
So, here is Ireland open-side flanker Fergus Slattery describing his part in one of the most notorious games in rugby history: Canterbury 9 British and Irish Lions 14, in Christchurch.
‘I was concussed after about eight or nine minutes and remained pretty out of it until about 10 minutes into the second half.
‘Alister hopkinson came up from the front of the lineout. I didn’t see him, but I got this massive punch in the mouth, completely blindsided. It cracked a bunch of teeth down to the root.
‘I was on the deck, concussed, but I played on. After a while the concussion started to drift away, so I’m able to remember different things that happened in the game, even though I was away with it. About five minutes later, I was running across the pitch, looking towards the goal posts and seeing this huge crowd of people and thinking, ‘Where the f*** am I?’
‘I went to Peter Dixon at the next lineout and asked: ‘Where are we?’ he looked at me, all agitated and said, ‘What do you mean? We’re in bloody Canterbury.’
‘About 10 minutes later I asked him again but, by then, he’d just been smacked and had no idea either. “I don’t know where the f*** we are,” he said. “F*** off.” I only realised where I was in the final quarter of the game.’
Now we can all laugh at this and no doubt it makes for wonderfully colourful conversations when the old boys get together — Gordon Brown, the Lions lock, recalled that he was at home one day when the telephone rang and a voice said, ‘this is Peter Whiting, the bugger that split your eye open in New Zealand. I’m touring Scotland and I’ll be at your home in six hours, get the beers on ice and the beds made up…’ — but it really isn’t any way to run a sport.
there is balance between accepting rugby’s physicality — and occasional lunacy — and understanding that it couldn’t continue as it was.
the carnage in Canterbury has thankfully long been consigned to history, but Williams’s hit on Anthony Watson shows how swiftly the sport could deteriorate, unchecked; certainly without brave men like Jerome Garces.
NO ReFeRee had ever sent off an All Black in New Zealand before Saturday. Some had talked about it, like Joel Jutge, who now admits he should have shown red to both tana Umaga and Keven Mealamu for the spear tackle that ended Brian O’Driscoll’s Lions tour after 75 seconds. Courageous, that, 12 years after the fact.
And Garces had every opportunity to duck it, as Jutge did in 2005. his video assistant, with the clearest view in the ground, gave him little encouragement in awarding the ultimate sanction, even asking him to take one last look at it on the giant stadium screen before making the call.
Garces never wavered from his real-time insistence that he was looking at a red-card offence. And if it seems incongruous to deem the correct call brave, consider that we were months away from the 50-year anniversary of the last All Black dismissal — and that the one before it dated from 1925.
technically, Williams is the first All Black to be shown a red card, because such a signal did not exist in 1967 when the All Blacks were last reduced to 14. Miscreants were simply requested to leave the field. So it was Garces, even more than the Lions, who dragged New Zealand into uncharted territory. None of their players could recall ever playing anywhere near 55 minutes with 14 men.
Sam Whitelock kept referring to sin-bin offences, but these total 10 minutes. Garces forced the All Blacks to play with the equivalent of six consecutive sinbinned players.
‘It’s never happened to me and it takes its toll,’ said Codie taylor. ‘Yeah, we probably had to dig a bit deeper. It’s tough. they’re big boys and they’re running hard.’
For the Lions, in Auckland on Saturday for the decider, balancing the obvious intensity required to win at eden Park with the discipline frequently missing in Wellington is key.
O’Brien’s hour in the dock should not have to serve as the warning, either. An extraordinarily harmful penalty count and Mako Vunipola’s departure to the sin bin — had he been cited instead of O’Brien it would have been easier to understand — could easily have cost the series.
Daft infringements are not to be confused with serious foul play, of course, but either way, there can be no repeat at eden Park and the oldest heads know it.
‘It’s a case, not of taking the foot off the gas, but of knowing when to put it to the floor,’ said Alun Wyn Jones, the Lions captain in their victorious decider against Australia in 2013.
‘I don’t see why we can’t do that. It should be easy not to try too hard — and a lot of the penalties we gave away, certainly at the start of the second half, were a result of trying too hard.’
‘In the heat of battle, things are different,’ said Conor Murray. ‘the penalties were silly, but controllable, so we’ve got to rectify that, we’ve got to be clean, or as clean as we can be.
‘In a test match there will always be penalties, for and against, but some of ours we’ve just got to iron out.’
Graham Rowntree, the Lions coach, warned that ill-disciplined players could lose their place in the team, but that threat is unlikely to be acted upon. Strong words will replace punitive action, although with Williams’s red the message is plain.
Rugby is a zero-tolerance sport now. Canterbury tales are for the after-dinner circuit, not beyond.