About time to turn the pointless clock back
STOP the clock, now and for always, amen. We’re talking about the so-called “game clock” here. Bin it and forget about it. Pretend it never started ticking in the first place. Rugby has served up many a gruesome sight we will never unsee: the silver studs of New Zealand boots ripping into Phil de Glanville’s face in Redruth; Joe Marler laying his grubby paw on Alun Wyn Jones’ crown jewels at Twickenham; the blighted Lions tour of South Africa in 2021. But that doesn’t mean we must put up with all of the sport’s unnecessary evils.
The “game clock” is a case in point. Or rather, it would be if it actually had a point, other than giving union’s professional class – by and large, it is available only to the pay-for-play brigade – yet another opportunity for brass-necked chicanery.
Remember Munster, back in their Heineken Cup-winning days, running down the hours with endless pick-and-trundles? If only it had stopped with them. How about the goalkickers, staring at the timepiece behind the sticks for a minute that seemed like a month, with the sole intention of ensuring that when they eventually put boot to ball, it would be the last act of the match.
What about the mind-numbing inevitability of teams using the scrum not as a launch pad for a late attacking move, but as a method of killing a tight contest stone dead? How many set-pieces awarded to the winning side in the two “death minutes” at the end are somehow made to last precisely 120 seconds? Anyone calculating this in the mere dozens doesn’t watch enough rugby.
Things came to the prettiest of passes at Welford Road eight days ago. It had been an East Midlands derby of the belting variety, full of fire and fury and next-door-neighbourly friction. When Northampton, a point to the good, were awarded a late line-out penalty by the referee, Wayne Barnes, the “game clock” told us there were 20 seconds left.
“It’s a good decision to give that (penalty) away…because Northampton were well set up there and could have run down the clock…and kicked it out,” pronounced Austin Healey, whose sharp-eyed analysis has, in recent seasons, put him a long way ahead of the broadcasting opposition. “At least now you get one more chance to win the ball…”
At this point, Barnes informed George Furbank, the Northampton outside-half, that the contest was in its last four seconds. Healey and his commentary box colleague Ben Kay were full of ideas as to how those seconds should be managed. “You tap, recycle and kick it out,” advised Kay. “You tap and run back to your own dead-ball area,” Healey countered. “Run away.”
Furbank took another route by kicking for touch. “That’s NOT what you do,” spluttered Healey. “That’s the worst decision. Now Leicester have a chance of winning the ball back.” You could see his point, even
“Bin the game clock and forget about it. Pretend it never started ticking in the first place"
it turned out to be the Saints, not the Tigers, who laid hands on the throw and duly brought the game to a conclusion.
Is it hopelessly wrongheaded to suggest that none of this pantomime would have occurred had someone pinched the “GC” before kick-off and buried it deep under the tarmac of a Leicester car park, perhaps in the hole left by the exhumation of Richard III? Which would have been appropriate, given that both turned out to be more trouble than they were worth.
Call your columnist a Luddite by all means – you may not be a million miles off – but there is precious little evidence that the “stopping” timepiece has added to the gaiety of union-playing nations. Would Bernard Foley of Australia have fallen foul of that rotten Bledisloe Cup call by the French official Mathieu Raynal had he not had one eye on the countdown display? Would every professional team feel obliged to defend passively in the final two or three minutes if they were unsure those minutes were actually underway?
And what about those referees who struggle to handle the pressure when the last knockings are announced with full public fanfare? It would be easier for them – and more gut-wrenchingly, blissfully tense for the rest of us – if the sport returned to its age-old mechanism of injury time, when a captain approaching the whistler-in-chief to ask “how long left?” would invariably be told to mind his own business.
In our modern world, the calthough culation of injury time would not necessarily rest with the whistler-inchief. There would be a colleague in a box somewhere, reacting throughout to the referee’s “time off ” signals and privately muttering “final play” in his ear when the moment arrived.
It is of course the case that teams would immediately devote significant amounts of energy to circumventing such a move, just as they find ways round every change of rugby process. Not to put too fine a point on it, one of the union game’s fundamental issues is the received wisdom that laws are there to be broken, as frequently and profitably as possible.
But if even 50 per cent of the clockwatching sharp practice disappeared because players were no longer certain of the big hand’s position vis-à-vis the little hand, it would be worthy of a celebration. About time, you might say.