It says a lot about the state of the game when we see four incredible Test matches over the weekend, as well as a couple of other very good ones, and all of the chatter and rattle since then has been around refereeing decisions, card and TMO interventions.
Now, I admit I was frustrated on Saturday in Cardiff. The outcome on pitch took away, wrongfully as it’s transpired, a key defender for us in the closing moments of a Test. But that’s just one micro incident, obviously one I view in personal and team context – there were plenty others.
Let’s examine a few stats from the weekend; in our game we had 93 minutes on pitch time. 41 minutes were ball in play, 52 minutes were stoppages. Is that what the punter is paying to see?
Quantum effect
Further, across all the games there were 61 TMO interventions with a combined stoppage time of 170 minutes! That’s almost three hours of dithering that the broadcasters have paid to cover. The only way of describing that is bloody absurd. We saw 14 yellow cards, and two reds, one a full and one a 20 minute upgrade from yellow. That, in my mind, is simply too many interventions and the cards are having a quantum effect on the way the game is being played.
One of the key factors that’s not helping is freeze frame and slow-motion replays. They simply don’t paint a true picture of rugby dynamics. Let’s go back to Lood de Jager versus France; Lood is 6’9″ tall – he’s coming in to clear and contest. Thomas Ramos is on his knees, technically out of play. As he approaches the number of dynamic actions taking place is vast and we have to acknowledge that. The decisions are being made in a binary fashion and there’s a tendency to make the images fit the protocols, rather than let the actions fit reality.
For those reading this who have played at a decent standard, these are moments of such fine time margins, you cannot react quickly enough to change the dynamics. We’re talking split seconds, and by the same token we’re asking a 6’9″, 130kg man to change in those split seconds, which is as near to biomechanically impossible as you’ll get.
Eddie Jones sledges skint Welsh Rugby and calls on World Rugby to act on ‘absurd’ red cards
I also have a big issue with the perception of the term ‘leading with the shoulder’. What crap! You cannot make a tackle without leading with your shoulder – it’s a ridiculous notion. Your shoulder impacts and then your arms wrap around – that’s the mechanical action.
I analogise it to catching a cricket ball – you don’t lead with your fingers – you’ll bloody well break them, any grade cricketer knows that! You lead with your palm, and as the ball nestles, your fingers wrap around the ball – exactly the same dynamics of a dominant tackle, where the tackle nestles in the shoulder and the arms wrap to grasp.
So, slowing down a play, that shows a shoulder first and freezing it is ALWAYS going to demonstrate a lack of wrap – when the truth is that the intended wrap, as we saw with Harry Hockings and Franco Mostert, was in the frames that followed. If the refs and TMOs freeze the footage or use super-slo-mo in situations like this, they are not seeing the true picture or dynamics. It’s no different to Donald Trump and the BBC – the edit is changing the picture of the narrative!
Let’s go back to ball in play time. Rugby has talked about wanting fatigue as a leveller. Wanting the really big men to tire so that space opens up. Well, how the hell are you going to achieve that when there’s 52 minutes of dead time in a match for the big boys to get their breath back, grab some cakes and recharge themselves? We want maximum ball in time, high intensity – and the consistent intervention of the TMO is preventing that.
Out of context
The issue is, we’re searching for perfection in the most complex of sports and that’s unrealistic. Perhaps social media drives this; a lot of passionate fans who will argue about injustices of micro moments ad nauseam based upon slo-mo replays and still shots taken completely out of context as they show only one moment in time.
We have to get back to a place where referees referee, and players get on with it. For me this means:
1. TMO intervention ONLY for foul play or for goal-line analysis of grounding.
2. Define clearly cynical play; a player going one handed speculatively for an interception is almost always done intuitively. It’s intuition, not cynicism. And an intercept the length of the pitch is a sight to behold.
3. Base calls on real time action and remove the stills that tend to take actions out of context. It is not about ‘the point of contact’ it’s about the overall intention of the action.
4. Remove confusion over cards; Yellow for repeated or cynical; red for foul or reckless. Simple.
5. Get pace into the game – remove the extended stoppages – and get fatigue into the match as jeopardy to create space and to improve athleticism.
Now, after the weekend, we’ve seen Mostert and Hockings have their cards rescinded. In both cases I agree with that; in the case of Hockings, who, in my opinion, made a brutal but legal hit, no head contact, shoulder first but with the arm in the process of wrapping, the interpretation of the officials meant a Test match lost and a Rugby World Cup ranking place removed out of our grasp, and that is bloody infuriating as Japan simply didn’t deserve that based on their performance. Sure, you might say it should still have been a penalty kick, but with Harry, a massive man, on the pitch, our ability to defend those mauls would have been much greater and I don’t know of anyone who might argue with me over that.