Andy Colquhoun Rugby
There is a rhythm to the rugby season by which we followers of the game can measure out the advance of each year.
The pungent scent of braaing meat hanging in the air of the Pretoria suburb of Sunnyside can only mean that the Blue Bulls are once more on the rampage at Loftus Versfeld. The first lashing from the Cape’s winter rain will inevitably mark the appearance of the Streeptruie at Newlands. And you know it’s the start of the rugby season when Super 12 coaches, the commentators and the sporting press whip themselves into a near-hysterical frenzy over the latest inequities visited on a noble game by the perfidious brotherhood of the referee.
It was ever thus.
Two years ago the cause clbre was neutral referees. Last year it was the excessive use of the yellow card and this year it is the referees’ interpretation of the tackle law. (Why do the International Rugby Board [IRB]and everyone else insist on calling it the “tackle-ball situation”? Is tackling of the non-ball carrier in rugby so common that we have to differentiate?)
Next year it will be something else and the year after it will be something else again.
An observant New Zealand critic noted that Auckland’s 12-12 draw with Queensland at the weekend was the first tryless match since the Super 12’s inception in 1996 – a small matter of 229 games. Some interpreted this as a disaster for the competition, coming in the wake of the latest refereeing controversy. To me it merely suggested that two sides had tackled properly for 80 minutes. South African referee Tappe Henning blew 32 penalties or free kicks in the match, which is only slightly more than this year’s Super 12 average of 29.
And explain this conundrum. If referees are ruining the game, how come the highest- scoring match also featured the highest number of penalties? Otago’s 65-23 victory over the Bulls produced 40 penalties or free kicks from the whistle of Australian referee Stuart Dickinson.
The problem is, was and ever will be that the game has too many laws.
Did you know there are 31 offences for which players can be penalised at the scrummage alone? Law 20: Scrummage is a document more dense and containing more sub-clauses than the treaty by which the British came to acquire Hong Kong.
The scrummage’s function surely is to restart the game after a knock-on, forward pass or some other technical mishap. The laws turn into a minefield for player and referee.
Then there’s this parroted IRB nonsense about the game being played by people on their feet. Have they never watched a game?
No player has left the field with clean knees since Naas Botha retired and the most frequently repeated action of any prop in a match is not hoisting his lock in the line- out but levering himself from the turf and into an upright position before trudging to the next breakdown.
Sharks coach Ian McIntosh has long argued that players should be allowed to burrow for the ball while off their feet. It makes sense because at any ruck or maul, most of the players are off their feet anyway.
The irony of the latest brouhaha is that the northern hemisphere game appears to have been liberated by the new interpretations while the south has been temporarily emasculated.
This season’s Five Nations matches have resembled the Super 12 of 1998 or, even better, of 1997, in which the referee has been the servant of the game rather than its schoolmaster. And who has been doing much of the refereeing? The same southern hemisphere referees who have been accused of killing the Super 12.
Perhaps it’s simply time our players to get their hands out of the rucks and stay onside. After all, the Waratahs have managed it.
They have conceded an average of only nine- and-a-half penalties per match, two-and-a- half fewer than the next best record (Canterbury, 12). Contrast those records with that of the Bulls (17,25), the Stormers (16,5) and the Chiefs (16,33), who have all taken a caning at some point in the opening rounds. If you are giving away penalties you are giving away possession.
Round five’s local focus will be on which Stormers side turns up at the Sydney Football Stadium on Friday: the aggressive, ruthless mob which triumphed in Wellington or the supine shower which lost in Canberra.
The improved Cats can kiss their season goodbye if they don’t beat Wellington in Bloemfontein on Saturday, while the Bulls are looking for consolation points against ACT. The match of the round, however, is at King’s Park on Friday night, where log leaders Otago are the visitors and someone’s unbeaten record is likely to go.
Unless, of course, we have another of these damnably common, tryless draws.