[caption id="attachment_70520" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="England fully exploited Ireland’s weakness in the scrum at Twickenham. "]
Purely in the interests of research, I watched the last half an hour of a rugby match involving the representatives of English and Wales a few weeks back. Almost a decade has passed since I sat through any part of a game involving the oval ball so I was intrigued to see if anything had changed. Lots had. Hardly any of it for the better. However, what disturbed me most of all was a little cameo that occurred with about 15 minutes remaining in the game.
There was a passage of play where the full-backs from both teams kicked the ball long and high into each other’s arms twice in succession. Four kicks inside a minute. Aside from being troubled by the fact there exists a bizarre sport where giving away possession and handing the attacking impetus to the opposing side is somehow regarded as a tactically astute, something else hit me.
Four long kicks inside a minute. That’s more direct kicking than I’ve seen in most championship Gaelic football matches over the past two decades. Obviously, I was very worried about this. Disturbed even. So, in an effort to explore further whether rugby truly now involved more kicking than a lot of games involving the Cork footballers, I sat down to take in Ireland versus England last Saturday week.
What a lucky break. If I’d have missed this, I would have missed out on the end of an era, the passing of a golden generation/insert whatever overheated cliché you like here. Even somebody as ignorant of rugby’s charms as myself recognized straightaway that this was a clash between two mediocre teams made worse by the conditions. Although it didn’t have to be quite as bad as it was.
You see, in a lot of ball-handling sports, players are smart enough to wear gloves to cut down on the amount of unnecessary fumbles. What is the problem with that? Is rugby too manly for it? Does it make eye-gouging or (fingers making incidental contact with eyes when done by Irish players) harder if you are wearing a covering? Wouldn’t it make sense to avoid the ball spilling all over the place by simply donning gloves like those worn by Gaelic footballers or American NFL players, those wusses.
Bad and all as the standard of this encounter was, we stuck it with for the whole 80 minutes. At times it was hard going, especially listening to all the moaning and whingeing about the Irish scrum being outclassed. Isn’t this what sport is about? Your opponent finds your weakness and brutally exploits it. The tone of much of the coverage seemed to indicate this was somehow regarded as unfair.
Of course, whisper it but the great open secret of rugby is that 99 per cent of those watching, writing and commenting on the game have no clue what goes on inside the scrum. Some pretend they do but really, they don’t. Yet, we must still take their analysis at face value.
I have a childhood memory of rugby that involves at least some instances of backs getting the ball, selling dummies and going past opponents. There was jinking involved and it was undeniably skillful and impressive. In the one and a bit games I watched in this Six Nations, I saw nothing at all like that. Rugby union now resembles rugby league for rich people, the same way Gaelic football has morphed into rugby league for Irish people.
Rugby union and Gaelic football have a problem in common too. Their players are so fit and strong now that there are too many men on the field. Having 15 men on a rugby pitch was fine when five or six of the pack were immobile fatties. Now that all of them are fit and can actually run, there is no space for creativity and it’s turned into rugby league (except they are smart enough in that code to play 13 a side). The GAA has the same difficulty now that fullbacks are no longer men mountains with no idea how to run more than five yards. They could and should go down to 13 per team too.
We aren’t totally blind to the charms of rugby. The use of video evidence and the miked-up referee are truly great innovations that add to the spectacle. Maybe the novelty has worn off for regular viewers but for a neophyte like myself, it’s fascinating to hear the official issue lectures on the field. Inevitably, it sticks in the craw when they take the moral high ground and say of alleged foul play “that has no place in this game.”
All statistical evidence would argue the contrary. The amount of gouging, biting and spear tackling that goes on would suggest foul play is actually an integral part of the sport. Perhaps for some voyeuristic fans, it is a large part of the allure too.
Watching Ireland and England, it was easy to fantasize about how wonderful it would be if the GAA miked up refs for the championship in a couple of months. Imagine the man in black telling a forward standing over a potentially equalizing free in Croke Park: “Tack this one over now and I’ll blow it up, I’m playing for the draw. Orders from on high.” This would greatly enhance the experience of fans watching on television.
Of course, we weren’t suckered in by the overarching narrative of Ireland’s defeat. We didn’t really buy into that stuff about the end of an era, the passing of a golden generation. Call us paranoid but we reckon that was just a canny marketing ruse, devised to dampen down expectations so that when Munster or Leinster win the Heineken Cup (the tournament nobody else in Europe takes as seriously as the Irish provinces!) in a few weeks time, that feat can be oversold to the Irish public as the greatest achievement of all time. Headlines with Lazarus in them are already being prepped in this regard. These rugby people, you’d put nothing past them.
