Red card experiment erodes player welfare
Let me remind you of the mantra that player welfare is paramount to World Rugby and its Unions. Virtually no announcement is complete unless the player welfare box is ticked.
The Rainbow Cup, the latest wheeze to try to breathe life into the PRO14, will trial some new law variations, one of which is that a player who is red-carded can be replaced after 20 minutes. When someone receives a red card it’s generally because they have committed a serious act of foul play, and of late that tends to mean some sort of a head shot, something everyone is working really hard to eliminate from the game. Now, however, they are going to trial downgrading the punishment.
This is a spineless capitulation to those who argue that a red card ‘ruins the game’, and is yet another nudge towards elite rugby being treated as entertainment rather than competitive sport. Now we’re going to see a situation where an opposition player could be stretchered off with a serious injury and the punishment is 20 minutes.
Admittedly the offending player can’t return, but in many cases that just means that one international gets replaced by another.
If we are serious about player welfare then we should be considering longer bans for acts of foul play that involve force to the head, not a lesser punishment. The way to eliminate dangerous contact with the neck and head is to show players that it won’t be tolerated, and that the punishment is draconian – hopefully this trial will go the way of many other experimental law variations that were tried, and found wanting.
Iknow that saying anything negative about rugby’s sacred cows irritates people, but I’m sick of the Lions tour before it has even happened. It’s surely time for a proper debate about whether the Lions as a concept has passed its sell-by date.
In another age the idea that the best players from the four home nations got together and headed off to the southern hemisphere was a romantic one, but that was then and this is now. If I choose I can watch every Test match that Australia, New Zealand and South Africa play, and in between RWC years, I might even see some of their best players playing in the Premiership or the Champions Cup.
The most important and best rugby in the past was the Five Nations, and then the Lions. It was pretty well the only opportunity fans got to see these ‘galacticos’ of the game, but the world is very different now.
First, the game is much more physical – cleaner because of the number of cameras around – but a lot more demanding. Pretty well everyone accepts that the calendar is overcrowded, and we have to find ways of cutting back – it isn’t going to be the Premiership or the Top14, because they’re here to stay, and are hugely successful.
So, we have the Lions, a throwback to a different era, organising a meaningless warm-up game against Japan (!), on the day of the Premiership final – you’d be hard pushed to think of a more calculated insult!
I have a suspicion that the Lions’ demographic is people of a certain age and older. I remember sitting round a radio listening to the Lions matches, and then seeing highlights a couple of days later once the tapes had been flown over. There was hardly any rugby televised in those days, bar the Five Nations and occasional knock-out cup game, and I wonder whether younger fans will feel anything like the same emotional attachment to the Lions?
I’m bored with hearing that friendships made by players on Lions tour last a lifetime – I don’t doubt it for a second, but what has that got do with the price of fish?
I can also understand people eulogising about the experience of going on a Lions tour, but is having a good time a reason for its existence?