This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with behaviour on the sidelines…
Slaps, kicks and rants
A fun weekend of rugby all over the place, both for leading teams and for a handful of teams struggling for form. The Waratahs back on track and the Hurricanes hitting category five. Bristol stunned by Harlequins while Saints, Bath and Leicester march on. Perpignan thrashing a lifeless Toulon and Toulouse in fine form. Glasgow and the Stormers kicking on towards home semi-finals.
And across all four top leagues, 25 matches, only two red cards. There have been far, far worse weekends for discipline. Still push one problem down somewhere, and so often it crops up somewhere else.
This weekend it was around the fringes. Even if not a top-flight game, the red card handed out to Alan Paver of the Cornish Pirates was an ugly thing. A full viewing of the incident, or more to the point, the critical moment, is unfortunately not available, but the moments leading up to it are available on YouTube and are pretty damning.
The Pirates’ bench can clearly be seen trying to prevent Jake Garside from grabbing the ball in order to get a quick restart going. When Garside realises that the referee’s decision is, in fact, a penalty to the Pirates, he can also clearly be seen trying to get away from the bench members he had been confronting, and being held back among the melee by, presumably, Paver. Upon which the YouTube stream cuts away to a replay and only returns to the action when the players from both sides have already rushed in to calm it all down.
So nothing conclusive, although the referee’s summary is pretty succinct and not the hesitant delivery of someone who was not sure of what he saw.
Anyway, it is notable that although the Pirates have accepted responsibility, acknowledged the gravity of it, pledged to cooperate with the RFU and investigate internally as well, they have stopped short of an apology. Not that such is absolutely due until Paver has been disciplined, but it did seem odd that on a weekend when Geoff Parling has been almost grovelling because he took umbrage with a ridiculous media stunt and quite rightly gave Craig Doyle a shove-off, a coach who got aggressive with an opposing player should be staying quiet.
And back to Parling: exactly what does he need to be sorry about? No malice meant from Doyle and his new sidekick or whatever, but it is ridiculous that TNT’s team thought they could be faffing around with a ball like that on a pitch where two professional teams are trying to do their jobs.
Parling could probably have avoided the f-bomb, although he probably had no idea the live cameras were actually rolling; of all the minutes’ coverage of the Gloucester-Leicester clash, the one of the presenter slicing a wide conversion several metres wide of the uprights was the most uninformative and infantile, so why would anybody conceive that it might be worth recording, never mind be on live TV. Was he censured for the shove? Good grief, if TV personalities are going to stuff around on the pitch like naughty schoolboys (not to mention scurrying away like them when the trouble comes) they ought to expect to be treated like such.
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TNT has at least apologised as well, most notably adding that the sequence had not been passed by anybody. But Parling’s addition of: “we have a great product in the Gallagher Prem and I offer my thanks to Craig Doyle and everyone at TNT for continuing to innovate and think differently… we’ll make sure we are fully aligned behind new ideas, including when best to use them; and keep pushing our game to new audiences,” smacks of a coach being forced by its media paylord to kow-tow to the corporate line when really, he was just irked by unnecessary interference while doing his job.
And on the subject of doing that job… not since Kevin Keegan slapped on a pair of noise-cancellers and got all shaky-voiced and misty-eyed almost 30 years ago can there have been as salty and subjective a rant about opponents as Donncha O’Callaghan’s diatribe on Glasgow last week.
Yet Glasgow will be happy. For all that stuff about using Glasgow’s antics as motivation, how Leinster will have ‘fuel’ and how they could ‘give them an absolute bopping’ in the rematch, it may serve O’Callaghan well to consider: it didn’t end all that well for Keegan.