This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with dissent on the pitch, the oddly interesting final day of European pool stages, and what goes on in Tshwane…
Taking a lead from the other game?
Far be it from anyone involved in rugby to look at the other game and consider that rugby might just benefit from some discipline initiatives. Imagine, right? Rugby taking a cue from soccer?
And yet. At some point in the second half of Leinster’s epic victory over La Rochelle, the visitors had an advantage. The ball was played, but it was turned over and Jack Conan had the break with the pitch in front of him. Ah well. The whistle blew and back we should have come for a penalty to the French.
Should have? Well, we did, but it took a moment, primarily because upon hearing the whistle, Conan belted the ball with the full force of his size 14s to the other end of the pitch.
Be clear: it was not an exit situation. Had the turnover counted, Conan would have drawn the final defender or cover and flipped the ball out to Tommy O’Brien, who would likely have been unstoppable. A kick was not on.
This happens a lot in such situations, same as that bit where a player on a penalised team seizes the ball at the blast of the whistle and takes it back a few metres from where the mark is, of the player bundled into touch lies on top of it with a ‘butter wouldn’t melt’ look on his face to stop the opposition taking a quick line-out. And et cetera, ad infinitum and increasingly, ad nauseam.
This season in soccer – or at the start of it at least, the energy for the crackdown seems to have waned as it all has dragged on – they’ve been issuing yellow cards for this stuff. In one or two high-profile cases it has meant a player getting his second yellow and being sent off. The battle is still being fought, but by and large, the impression – admittedly based on a limited sample size – is that the are doing that stuff less than before.
Is such a crackdown due in rugby? Yellow cards are overkill, but the old ‘ten more metres’ thing has died out as referee discussions have become more formalised, yet this is hardly a discussion. Either you are stopping the play or you are not. Ten metres would be good as a starting deterrent or, in those infuriating cases where a player carries the ball away from the penalised breakdown and advantaged team and then drops it on the floor so as not to appear too unsporting, at the very least take it from the mark at where he drops it, let the guilty party determine the mark and the punishment distance himself. And for those guys who throw the ball away when it is in touch, simply penalise them, full stop.
If soccer can begin to win this battle, rugby definitely can. It’s time to start giving, to balance out the taking.
Can you do it on a wet night in…?
Sticking with those soccer analogies for a moment, there’s that one about great teams full of great players all being very well and good and such, but the question always is fielded: can they do it on a wet and windy night in Stoke – a reference to a stadium where the website warns visitors of a microclimate in the location which ensures even a mild zephyr and a few drops of rain can feel like an Atlantic hurricane if you are not prepared?
For Toulouse at the moment, the answer to that question appears to be: no. Glasgow’s wind-assisted comeback in round two of the Champions Cup was an eye-opener, but Sunday’s defeat to Saracens was in no small part a case of a team not quite able to dig in and be streetwise as well as the opposition.
Once is a coincidence, twice is carelessness and all that. It does not make Toulouse a bad side, nor does it make it more unlikely that Toulouse might be on the podium in May flicking V-signs with both sides of the fingers in the direction of this column.
But this defeat does make it likely that they will have to travel for the knockout stages, while it should also raise a few questions in opposition coaching think-tanks. Especially the one about whether this is a team that can be got at now, a question not often asked of Toulouse.
Crisis mode at Loftus
Seven defeats in a row. A coaching exit in the off-season and subsequent staff overhaul five months later. National team coaches parachuted in to little apparent effect. 47 points shipped in one first half. At home.
No, all is not well at Loftus Versfeld. The team that shipped those 47 points featured no fewer than ten international players, many of whom have now explicitly been asked to step up and lead by example, many of whom were, however, also pretty heavily involved in the player revolt that saw Jake White’s period end in August.
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White himself said at the time he also perhaps felt he had taken the team as far as he could, that new players were needed to shake things up. The players evidently disagreed, and so White left. Five months later, so did his assistants. But whatever changes in the coaching box, the on-pitch product has only worsened.
So what about those players that Jake White felt needed freshening? Should they have been more careful about what they wished for? Or has time proved that White might have had a point?
Either way, the tepidness of the team’s performance on Saturday would suggest that the road back from this low point is as long as the one from Pretoria to Pau, where the Bulls‘ European campaign may be extinguished this weekend.