RUGBY
Andy Capostagno
It is safe to assume that Butch James will never forget the 2001 rugby season. As the fulcrum of a rejuvenated Sharks team he got to play in the Super 12 final. A month later he played his first Test match and 10 days after that outing against France he received his first ban. If it has all gone by in a whirl, James now has six weeks to reflect at leisure.
For six weeks is the length of the suspension imposed on James by a South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu) disciplinary hearing. The meeting at Loftus Versfeld lasted seven hours and was finally wrapped up in the small hours of Thursday morning. James is set to appeal.
James was found guilty of two misdemeanours committed during the match between the Cheetahs and the Sharks in Bloemfontein last Saturday. He received four weeks for a dangerous tackle on Cheetahs wing Wylie Human, and four more (with two suspended) for a transgression of law 10.4 (l): “A player must not, while the ball is out of play, commit any misconduct, or obstruct or in any way interfere with an opponent.”
In this case James was guilty of pushing Human over the dead-ball line after the winger had scored the first of his three tries. After the game Sharks coach Rudolf Straeuli admitted that he would not have been surprised if the game had restarted with a penalty to the Cheetahs on the halfway dot.
And therein lies the problem. James committed three fouls on Human during the course of the game and referee Tappe Henning failed to deal adequately with any of them. The first stiff-arm tackle came in the opening 10 minutes and, despite the recommendation of a yellow card from touch judge, James Sheriff, Henning did nothing.
Henning said that he was better placed to see the incident and absolved James of blame.
The second stiff-arm came shortly afterwards, this time on the touchline and under the nose of Sheriff. Henning issued a warning and awarded a penalty. The third came five minutes into the second half. Human scored his try and was sent flying by James. Henning again did nothing.
The conclusion we must draw from all this is that as far as the referee was concerned James had done nothing out of the ordinary during the course of the match. In fact it was not until citing commissioner Willem Venter got involved that things began to move.
On the evidence of what he saw on television, Venter decided that the referee had not adequately disciplined James during the match and recommended a disciplinary hearing to Sarfu.
The crazy aspect of all this is that a man watching the game at home had a better view of it than the referee in charge of the match.
Is there a way around this? Yes, there is. Its official title is television match official, but Steve Strydom, the chairman of Sarfu’s referees committee, refers to it as the TMO. Last week the TMO was Arrie Oberholzer.
Like Venter, Oberholzer had a perfect view, from several angles, of James’s tackling offences, but could do nothing about them because the International Rugby Board (IRB) laws allow the TMO only to judge on try scoring or touch in goal.
A clearly exasperated Strydom told me: “We are working on law proposals [to increase the powers of the TMO] but it’s an extremely slow process. You have to go through the IRB, the proposals have to be in before a certain date and frequently the IRB decision is to do nothing.
“In this year’s Super 12 Owen Finegan stood on Michael Foley’s head and the referee, Jonathan Kaplan, asked the TMO to indicate who was the dirty player. That was outside the protocol and it caused a lot of trouble. We had calls from all over criticising Jonathan, but it indicated the great usage that can be got from the TMO in clearing up these kinds of issues.”
In this instance it might have saved James’s season. Instead Sarfu chose to throw the book at him. The chairman of the disciplinary hearing, Piet Niemann, said: “Regarding the first charge of dangerous play, we took into account the fact that a similar offence in the Test match against France earlier this year was proved by Sarfu. [James received a two-week ban in June for a late and dangerous tackle on French left wing David Bory during the second Test in Durban.]
“We discussed at length the question of life skills. Our intention was to provide Butch with something similar to what Herschelle Gibbs has undergone and Rudolf Straeuli indicated that Natal has the facilities to do that. We ordered Butch to go for counselling in conjunction with the Natal Rugby Union.”
Some good may eventually come out of this, but right now it feels like a sledgehammer has been used to crack a nut.