Gallagher: Was May >> hurdle try illegal move?
A“Breakdown has been allowed to resemble chucking out time at a Wild West saloon”
much better performance from England and indeed a much better performance from Italy in a sparky occasionally feisty match that maintained your interest but not for the first time I was left wondering how serious rugby really is in minimising serious injury.
The agonising, blood curdling shriek of agony that echoed around Twickenham when Jack Willis, his studs stuck in the turf, was unceremoniously rolled over in an unnatural position as Italy cleared him out, was the stuff of nightmares. It certainly stayed with me for a couple of hours yesterday evening.
Willis has already suffered more than enough injury heartache for one so young and you fear the worst while hoping for the best when the consultants do their stuff this week and assess the damage.
What is so frustrating from the outside looking in though is how the breakdown has been allowed to resemble chucking out time at a Wild West saloon. There’s an element of the Emperor’s clothes, nobody in officialdom will state the bleeding obvious about so called clear-outs being the scourge of the modern game.
I’ve been banging on about this ad nauseam for nearly a decade along with others like Ben Ryan so I won’t rehearse all the old arguments other than to say that if the breakdown area was refereed according to the law there would be another 15 penalties in that one area per game. What everybody has forgotten, not least the refs, is that you have to be bound on to another player to make contact legally. Law 9.2 states: “A player must not charge into a ruck or maul. Charging includes any contact made without binding on to another player in the ruck or maul.”
When was the last time you saw anybody clearing out while bound on? To salvage the game as a spectacle referees, with the encouragement and connivance of the authorities, allow players to fly in off their feet – often from an offside position – and wipe out opposition players who are legally minding their own business, often nowhere near the ball or a long way behind it.
Exposed heads and necks become targets for shoulders, crafty, accidentally-on-purpose chicken wing elbows, neck rolls – illegal but not always reffed – and turtle rolls which seemed to be accepted but are no less dangerous.
Peter O’Mahony rightly got sent off against Wales in the opening round for his reckless challenge on Tomas Francis who did well to escape serious injury. He could easily have suffered the same fate as the unfortunate Willis. The Zander Fagerson incident and sending off at Murrayfield yesterday wasn’t pretty either. It’s carnage.
There wasn’t the element of foul play to Willis’ injury yesterday although to my mind once you are off your feet you should not be allowed to execute a turtle toll, just as you are never allowed to play the ball when you are off your feet. It was still a penalty offence.
Rugby refuses to grasp the nettle on this one, mainly because the alternative – to allow old fashioned rucking – is wrongly treated with alarm. To my eyes proper rucking – properly reffed – is considerably safer than the uncontrolled mayhem of the modern day breakdown with its gratuitous wipe-outs with players – not even in possession or contesting possession – blindsided by cheap shots and twisted and contorted into unnatural positions by martial arts moves that should be confined to the dojo.
And then there is the Jonny May try. Now I will acknowledge it was spectacular and crowd pleasing but call me an old killjoy but it shouldn’t have been allowed to stand.
Yes, of course, you can dive for the line and an increasing number of wings are expert at those brilliant jacknifes in which they kick out their legs into touch to give them extra time and space to reach back in field and effect in the act of touching down, often taking the corner flag with them which is now legal.
Great stuff. The watching fans and TV audiences love it but for a while I’ve wondered where this is taking the game. How is a defender meant to execute a fair and safe tackle against rugby’s equivalent of Tom Daly launching himself off the springboard. Still the boat has sailed on that one, the authorities want it. It’s a thing.
But feet first hurdling at any stage of the game – and May has previous on this one from during his first spell with Gloucester – can never ever be right or legal even if you try and argue it’s in the act of scoring. It’s not a dive, it’s a reckless hurdle as anybody who has had their jaw broken or copped a concussion trying to tackle a hurdler will confirm.
There are good reasons why hurdling – and its defensive cousin hacking – have been banned from the dawn of rugby time. It’s dangerous and sets other precedents, not just safety. It you start hurdling, jumping into the tackle or effectively long jumping to the try line, theoretically anybody who tries to tackle is likely to be carded for tackling a man in the air and a penalty try awarded. That doesn’t feel right.
The logic of yesterday’s call is that we now have a precedent for hurdling into the tackle on the tryline. Coaches and players pick up on these things very quickly. I see trouble ahead on this one, at some stage although probably not until a defender gets badly injured.
Elsewhere it was a game of interesting cameos. It was so good to see Anthony Watson running free again and Henry Slade seemed to take on more responsibility which is never a bad thing for England. Elliot Daly also showed more inclination to trust in his running skills although his defence still looks a little jittery as did George Ford’s on occasions.
Up front Jonny Hill found his international feet and went toe to toe with Itoje for MOM honours. Hill is big, athletic and hard but he has also got that Itoje quality of doing scores of little things well during the course of 80 minutes.
The absent Joe Launchbury was arguably England’s player of the autumn but there is no sense of Hill keeping the seat warm for the Wasps skipper. As ever with England it’s hellish difficult to nail down a starting place in the second row.
Another plus was Dan Robson, who thus far has been limited to unsatisfactory “minutes” – a difficult role – and has struggled a little to make an impact. Not yesterday when he got given a much longer run, and breathed life back into England when they went quiet. Eddie Jones is a hard man to convince, his default setting is to preserve the status quo, but it must be getting very close indeed between the Wasps scrum-half and Ben Youngs.