THE LAW IS AN ASS
There’s an exciting round of autumn internationals to be played this coming weekend but as the past two weeks have shown, any prediction around who might win or lose should be predicated by a disclaimer: “This could all be influenced, in either direction, by a debatable red card.”
Actually the word debatable is the key one there. What card isn’t open to some kind of debate? Gone are the days of proper skullduggery directing the sending off, meaning someone gets deliberately kicked in the head or punched Kallie Knoetze style (sorry for showing my age) like Eben Jansen once did to Morne du Plessis in a Currie Cup game sometime back in the 1970s. If that happened today there surely would be no debate. He’s off. Gone.
But sending off was a relative rarity back in those days and there were many incidents that these days would see a player banished for an entire season for his misdemeanour that went unpunished. These days it happens all the time, and it is invariably at best the result of clumsiness, rather than malicious intent, that the red card comes about.
There are times when the challenge is too clumsy to be excused. In 2002 when Springbok lock Jannes Labuschagne was sent off early in a game at Twickenham, his challenge on England flyhalf Jonny Wilkinson didn’t, I believe, have any malicious intent. But it was just way too clumsy. Off. You’re gone.
I can’t remember there being too much debate about that one, although there was quite rightly considerable debate, driven mainly by the UK media, over whether there should have been more red cards.
For the Boks reacted that day to being down to 14-men down, and their captain Corne Krige to the sight of his mostly inexperienced players taking on the looks of deers in the headlights, by just going out to hurt their opponents physically. Which they did.
And they hurt themselves too - both physically, because it was a tackle from Corne that injured flyhalf Andre Pretorius, and mentally and emotionally, because they lost the game 53-3. Until the Boks lost 57-0 to the All Blacks in Albany 15 years later, that was South Africa’s most ignominious defeat.
But back to the present day, when cards are as prevalent at rugby matches as duck droppings around a pond in a London park - clumsy is sometimes unavoidable, and therefore a red card unavoidable, at a time where the drive to make the game completely safe, which frankly is an impossible task if rugby is to remain a contact sport, has made the law a bigger ass than it has ever been.
WHY I CAN ONLY SHRUG MY SHOULDERS
The Labuschagne red card is remembered because at the time it didn’t happen that often. Even in 2013, when Bismarck du Plessis saw red in Auckland, it was a notable thing because it was so rare. Not so much anymore. So forgive me when people ask me, as many have this week, if I shrug my shoulders over the Lood de Jager incident last weekend.
Like most people, when it happened in real time I missed it. It was so quick. When the television replay came into it, and the incident was slowed down, then I feared the worst for De Jager and the Boks. Only in my mind “the worst” wasn’t what “the worst” became. My colleague Brenden Nel texted me straight after the lock was carded to say that “we can’t complain about that”.
And I didn’t complain either for I wasn’t properly following what referee Angus Gardner meant when he said “permanent red”. Because the optics hadn’t been good, and sometimes I think it is only the optics that matter, meaning the message sent to the mothers of would-be rugby playing kids when they watch that in slo-mo. I resigned myself to De Jager getting a 20 minute red. Meaning a replacement could come onto the field after 20 minutes. Presumably Brenden thought that too.
It was when the full implication of what Gardner said, and to be fair he was brow-beaten by his assistants, that the indignation set in. That wasn’t a malicious or deliberate attempt to hurt Thomas Ramos, who frankly is in former Wallaby scrumhalf Nic White’s league when it comes to soccer style assimilation.
It was at worst clumsy. Maybe a 20 minute red even if there were mitigating circumstances, for that is the way it is in rugby these days. The law is an ass and will continue to be so and all we can do is shrug our shoulders.
LET PLAYERS HAVE MORE SAY ON LAW MODIFICATIONS
What for me was significant though was that every person who has played the game who was asked about the incident appeared to say the same thing, which can roughly be simplified into “unavoidable rugby incident”. They were, in no particular order, Nick Mallett, Schalk Burger, Jeff Wilson, Mils Muliana, the Beaver (former All Black flyhalf Stephen Donald)…
You name him, if he’s played international rugby he will say virtually the same thing. And it was the same thing with the red card shown to Tadgh Beirne, the Ireland forward, the week before. In fact, after that game, even a current player, an opponent, Beauden Barrett, came out and defended the player and intimated it was the wrong decision. Which if you just use plain logic, it was - the bump was unavoidable given that Barrett was receiving a flat pass that was probably actually forward.
Shouldn’t recently retired rugby players, who are well aware of the need to make the game safe because they lived through it and know full well how costly both injuries and suspensions are to you in your playing career, have more of a say than they do in directing law changes and modifications?
Another thing - it’s the slow motion replays that provide the distortion that referees and TMOs act on. There needs to be more cognisance of the fact that it all happens in a split second. You watch a slo-mo replay and you find yourself wondering why De Jager didn’t think about making a show of trying to wrap his arm. But it happened in a millisecond.
Conversely, there have been people claiming that Ramos was “calculated” in his part, throwing the ball in De Jager’s face, deliberately trying to create the situation that led to the sending off. That might almost seem plausible if the whole act had happened in slow motion, but it didn’t.
The whole thing is rubbish and is ruining the sport and I’ve had a problem with it ever since the 2017 Super Rugby final was ruined by the sending off of Kwagga Smith for what was also at best a moment of clumsiness.
I’ve got zero faith in the people running the sport, and it doesn’t just come down to law changes but also the issue of scheduling and lack of a global season, and sacrificing the ethos of the sport to the economic imperative, that all I can do is shrug my shoulders. And say, like Jean de Villiers made a habit of when he was Bok captain, “It is what it is”.
So who will be sent off this week? I haven’t a clue, but it could be anybody. The only thing I know for certain that won’t be sent off is the collective ‘ass’ that is ruining the game…
BOKS THWARTED THE BOMB SQUAD
So here’s an admission - I am sorry for the player, but in retrospect I am glad from a South African viewpoint that Lood was sent off. Because, remembering the debate around the Bok win in the last World Cup final against an All Black team that had suffered a red card, it did prove emphatically that it is possible to win with 14-men.
And it was helped in no small part by another of Rassie Erasmus’s innovations that keep him and his team ahead of their opponents. Andre ‘Flenter’ Esterhuizen’s role as a hybrid player in that win cannot be underestimated. And yet back in late June, when it first happened against the Barbarians, I thought it might just be a one-off done for the purpose of Rassie creating a talking point.
What was writ large more than anything in the Paris game though, and the Esterhuizen role is a prime example, was how the Boks have continued to evolve ahead of those who are mimicking them. France have become the biggest mimics of the Boks, and Galthie of Erasmus. They had a proper Bomb Squad on duty at Stade de France, at least one of the SA 2019 and 2023 vintage.
To me there was a big similarity between this most recent game and the World Cup quarterfinal at the same venue two years earlier. In the sense that in both instances the Boks outlasted their opponents. France were set up to learn from that mistake, only to find that the Boks, with the hybrid Esterhuizen move to cover for the Lood red card coupled with the change of dynamic introduced since Tony Brown’s arrival as attack coach, has moved the Boks forward since 2023.
The world champions haven’t stood still. Neither have France, but their change has been a quest to bridge a divide that existed in 2023. The Boks aren’t where they were in 2023, so that French quest was in vain. And so it proved.
A 15-win at France’s home ground, where they’ve only lost once in the previous 16 games, and that was to the Boks, ended any debate about which team is best. For French people too.
FUSS OVER ENGLAND’S ‘POM’ SQUADS INDICATES TIME WARP
So having said the above, that France are behind South Africa, let there be a qualification added - they may be second, but they are far nearer to the Boks than any other team on the planet right now. They were well beaten in Paris, but could have won the game in the third quarter, and it was a similar story in 2023. They are the team the Boks need to be most wary of, there’s no question about that.
The other team that is in my view starting to emerge as potential challengers is England, who suddenly appear to have a wave of X-factor players flooding into their system, such as Henry Pollock and the England A and Saracens winger Noah Caluori, who could prove a significant point of difference to their game.
However, with memories of their then coach Eddie Jones chiding the English media in 2019 for not being up to date with modern rugby when they kept questioning him on why he was starting with a player they thought was inferior to one on the bench, I had to laugh this week to the reaction when it dawned that Steve Borthwick is now going for what they’ve dubbed a ‘Pom Squad’.
Meaning that some significant players are now playing off the bench. In The Times there was a big story about it, about how egos now have to be parked, that first choice players are now going to have to accept that they may not start. That six British and Irish Lions are expected to play against the All Blacks off the bench on Saturday was seen as big news.
For goodness sake, Eddie was right, and it has been a reality for longer than just the six years since he spoke at that press conference in Japan - rugby is a 23-man game now, and has been for a long time. If England, and their media, are only cottoning onto that now they’ve been slow to learn something that has been obvious in this country almost since the day Rassie took over as coach.
NATIONS SERIES IS NOT NECESSARY
The autumn internationals, as they invariably are, have been fun, and there has usually been some added context to make them more important. For instance, Scotland’s heroic fightback in the third quarter against New Zealand in Edinburgh last week was in quest of what would have been that nation’s historic first win over those opponents.
The game in Paris was for “we are the best in the world” bragging rights. The All Blacks think they are chasing a Grand Slam, although I don’t see that as their game against Ireland was at a neutral venue.
So why is the Nations Series, set to be introduced next year with points on the line, necessary? When Joe Marler retired last year from playing for England he described the autumn internationals as friendlies, but that is not how they are approached. They are all stand alone games that, for one reason or another, really matter to the teams.
Introducing the Nations Series was supposed to introduce context, but if the people running the world game were paying any attention they’d know the context is already there. As is the appetite for these games, every stadium appears to be full. Even the one in Wales…
THE VINEYARD HAS GROWN WITH THE BOKS
So there always has to be some travel in these columns, and I did travel this week. It was a half hour journey from my home in Blouberg/West Beach to Newlands. Not to the old stadium, meaning the now derelict edifice that used to host rugby matches, nor to the cricket ground next door, but to the Vineyard Hotel.
Now before someone accuses me of not getting out often enough because I am making a significant event out of nothing, let me add that it was for a two night overnight stay, and not a drink in the pub or a meal in one of the restaurants. My wife is Scottish and she has Scottish friends who always treat us to a two-night stay somewhere when they visit, and this time it was at their home away from home in the southern suburbs.
I am one of those who feel if a place is less than three hours from your home you can hardly call it a getaway, and the mileage done on my car in recent times is indicative of that attitude, but let’s just say that it felt like a getaway. When you look out your hotel window onto the leafy grounds of the hotel and then beyond that onto Table Mountain it is hard to imagine there is a busy road not far away.
It was not my first stay at the Vineyard, and here starts the reminiscing - my first visit was in 1992, when what was then the South African Morning Group (of newspapers) sent me on my first Bok tour, which also just happened to be the first Bok tour of the post-isolation era. I worked for the Natal Mercury at the time and lived in Durban.
The Boks warmed up for that trip to France and England in Cape Town and stayed at that hotel and the newspapers that made up the Morning Group decided I should be there for the training camp. The Boks had lost to the All Blacks and Australia in their first post-isolations games, and there was a bleak attitude to the national team, coached by John Williams, who it was felt were behind the times when it came to the evolution of the game.
There had been calls for them to modernise and we saw a bit of it at a training camp which happened to be the first proper one the Boks of that era had experienced. When they played the All Blacks and Wallabies, they came together the week before the game.
Anyway, one of my fellow writers dubbed the Boks of that era “The Retroboks” and it fitted, not just for the style of play either. It was during that week at the Vineyard, where the Boks were also staying, that they were introduced to a fitness trainer from Stellenbosch who was rushed in at late notice because the boss, Doc Danie Craven, wasn’t happy with having a women (Eugenie Short) doing the job.
Bokkie was an interesting fitness trainer - every time he had a break he seemed to sneak off for a cigarette. That was ahead of the tour I described in this column last week - the Boks and media did the whole of France in a bus.
Anyhoo, the hotel has changed into a much grander version of its 1992 self, as of course have the Boks. Under Rassie the Boks have made good the shortfall there was on their international return, one that we were unaware of at the time as we, and not just the rugby players and administrators, thought the Currie Cup was the World Cup.
Some 33 years on from our return to the international game the Boks have modernised to the point that it is the rest of the world that has at times appeared to be retro. The Boks are ‘Retroboks’ no more.