Andy Capostagno Rugby
The Coastal Sharks have got a bye this weekend. Time to relax at home instead of living out of a suitcase abroad. The whole squad will revel in their free time. Well, maybe not the whole squad. One man will have time on his hands that he could well do without. That man is Wickus van Heerden.
At the time of writing, Van Heerden was still waiting for his lawyers in Sydney to frame fully his appeal against an 18-month ban imposed for biting the arm of New South Wales prop, Richard Harry.
He was hoping for a reduction to six months, but even if he gets it, time has run out for the kid brother of Moaner van Heerden.
His coach Ian McIntosh put it in a nutshell: “He’s devastated. At the end of last year he was only a fringe member of the squad and when we sat down to select the Super 12 squad this year his age (32) obviously counted against him. But he got back into the squad by the skin of his teeth and he bust a gut to raise his game to new levels and I believe he’s played some of the best rugby of his life in the last two months.”
And now it’s all over because a citing commissioner in Australia gave Wickus 18 months off for a bite. It doesn’t matter what you think about biting as a pastime, ask yourself whether a man sitting in front of a video machine should have that much power. Mac says no. “The ridiculous thing is that there is no differentiation between ripping a guy’s ear off and giving him a nip on the arm. I could have done more damage to Richard Harry’s arm with a pinch than Wickus did with his teeth [protected as they were by a mouth guard].”
“Meanwhile a genuinely dangerous incident like Joeli Vidiri’s high tackle on Cabous van der Westhuizen last year goes unpunished. We presented the evidence to the citing commissioner and he laughed at us.”
The problem is that statements like these will be taken as sour grapes, because the Sharks were hung out to dry by a hugely committed Waratahs lineup. But Mac is a man who lives for the game and wants to see it improved to the point where it is the perfect product for everyone, not just the purists.
That can surely never happen when foul play, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
The Sharks need their week off to recover from yet another going-over from antipodean teams. “You should see the guys’ backs after the tour,” says Mac, “some of them look like they’ve been flogged.”
They have not, of course. Rather they have been raked – and therein lies both the ailment and the cure. The referees in New Zealand and Australia are allowing the ball to be competed for on the ground far more vigorously than their South African counterparts. If you’re on the wrong side you will get rucked out of the way, with the result that backs are turned into scratching posts.
“It’s law 18, the tackled ball. Our guys are demanding that players arriving at the tackle stay on their feet to play the ball. In New Zealand and Australia guys are allowed to come flying in, and what they are basically doing is stopping the ball coming out quickly. Killing it, in fact. As long as our referees are blowing the other way South African teams will be at a disadvantage.”
So what’s the answer? “Well Doc Craven always used to say `What’s wrong with playing the ball on the ground?’ We want the ball, not the whistle. Blow the guy who’s killing the ball, not the one who’s trying to play it. The lineout used to be a helluva problem. But we sorted it out by allowing support of the jumper and if we can sort out the tackle ball situation we’ll be another big step down the line, because a lot of foul play occurs as a direct result of frustration at the point of breakdown.”
There are those who will tell you that the game is cleaner now than it has ever been. The probing nose of the television camera has a lot to do with that. Accusations of eye gouging in the scrums still occur, but the days when part of a flankers job was to throw mud into the eyes of the opposition prop seem to have gone.
Equally, bag-snatching, the friendly art of squeezing an opponent’s goolies, is no longer de rigueur. Even good old-fashioned punching seems to be on the way out. Sort out the tackle and we might yet produce a game that everyone wants to play.
ENDS