No winners in games marred by that kind of red card

When you break a hoodoo at a venue where you haven’t won in 11 years it should be an occasion for riotous celebration but Cell C Sharks coach Sean Everitt wasn’t exactly cartwheeling with joy when he faced the media after his team breached the Loftus fortress at the weekend.

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“Was it a complete performance? Not by any means. But we must enjoy this, we haven’t won at Loftus for a while now and the result is important,” said Everitt.

“People talk about the need to be sticking together when lose, we must also stick together when we win. Today we showed unbelievable character. We had to keep the Bulls out a number of times. The plan was not to give them opportunities in our 22 but they had about 11 in the first half alone. We showed great resolve. After a loss like last week’s we needed to get back on track and we did that.”

Everitt comes across as quite a laid-back character at the best of times and his calmness is probably one of his great qualities as a coach, but you’d perhaps expect a bit more excitement from him. After all, the Bulls have dominated the Sharks at Loftus for a long time, and while it was a different team, the last time the Sharks went to Pretoria was for the 2021 Currie Cup final where they lost by nearly 50.

But if the Sharks celebrations were more the echoes of relief you get from a Comrades runner who achieves his goal but is too physically shattered by the experience to really celebrate, there was good reason for it. The red card that Morne Steyn received in the 11th minute of the game that banished him from the field ensured that it was always likely to be a day when there’d be no winner.

LIKE LOSING A QUARTERBACK

Bulls coach Jake White likened the loss of a flyhalf to the loss of a quarterback, who is there to control and drive the game, in American football, and of course he was right.

The Bulls did reshuffle by sending outside centre Lionel Mapoe to the side of the field and bringing on Chris Smith as a replacement pivot, but they were condemned to being a man down for the rest of the game and with an important figure like Steyn the man that was banished, the Bulls really had no price.

That they did well enough and dominated possession and territory to the extent that they did, to nearly come back and win at the death was a tribute to the Bulls, but questions do need to be asked about the prevalence of red cards, indeed any cards full stop, for they are killing the game.

The drive to cut out high tackles is understandable given the need to protect the head area. The later incident that saw Sharks replacement scrumhalf Grant Williams carded was an example of why it is necessary, as Smith, the man that Williams clashed with, had to leave the field injured. The law is there to protect the likes of Smith.

At the same time though, that law is an ass because in neither of the red card incidents was there malicious intent. Sending off players, and turning the game into a mismatch, because of what could just be an accident or slight lack of accuracy just doesn’t make sense.

In both instances referee AJ Jacobs, with the help of TMO Quinton Immelman, made the right call. But having Steyn sent off was not good for the Loftus game and it meant that there was always going to be an asterisk next to the result regardless of what happened.

Indeed, in a situation like that, it is the team that is down on numbers because of a card, such as when White coached a 14-man Sharks team to a famous win in Christchurch in 2014 and the Bulls at Newlands in 2020, that really has everything to gain from the incident.

“I have been in teams that play with 14 and have sometimes won, teams get extra motivation from it,” agreed Everitt, who would have been part of White’s coaching team in that aforementioned Christchurch game.

On Saturday his team lost, but White was still able to say he was proud of his players, and so he should have been. They nearly won despite the odds stacked against them.

DEBATE NEEDS TO BE HAD

There needs though to be a debate about whether the current situation where any player who makes contact with the area from the neck up is automatically red carded is good for the future of the sport. As Everitt said after the game, rugby is a contact sport.

So that sort of thing is going to continue to happen. And cards can ruin a big occasion game, like what happened when Kwagga Smith was red carded for what was an inaccurate rather than malicious challenge in the air in the first half of the 2017 Super Rugby final in Johannesburg.

In last year’s Rainbow Cup, we saw an experimental law introduced whereby instead of a team being condemned to playing a man down for the entire part of the match that was remaining, the disadvantage in numbers would last for 20 minutes. The banished player would not be allowed to come back onto the field, so he was still penalised, and so was the coach who had to bring a player from the bench earlier than he intended.

But having a red carded player replaced from the bench did preserve the all-important 15 against 15 ethos that surely all rugby people want to see, and it is difficult to understand why the experiment wasn’t carried through into law.

For misdemeanours that have always been sending off offences in rugby, such as tramping a prone player on the head, punching or some other malicious action, then the full match sanction is the right one. Red cards though for technical offences, which include the Steyn type of incident as well as the Kwagga Smith one, are becoming too prevalent and it’s a blight on the sport.