Blood & Mud

Back to surreality

by Richard O'Hagan

Sometimes, the world of rugby can be a surreal place, no matter which code you follow. After all, any universe where Stephen Donald isn't allowed to play for Bath, but Lee Mears is, must be a prety odd one.

Today, everyone was getting very excited about the award of the new Super League licences - franchises in all but name - when it all went a bit strange. The one team that the Super League desperately wanted to keep, the Crusaders, withdrew their application for a licence.

Did the Super League want to keep them? You bet. They were probably the last remaining hope of proving that the UK market for rugby league extends south of Manchester (save for London, where there are enough notherners, kiwis and Aussies to sustain a side).

This nonsense is going on for years and it has become something of a Mexican standoff (no pun intended) with one side determined to expand the reach of their game and the other determined to have nothing to do with the thirteen man game. And yet there are old, traditional clubs such as Halifax who cannot get into Super League because some crazed bureaucrats have decided that ploughing money into the game's heartland is a waste of time.

That's right. Putting money where people could use it isn't worthwhile. What a surreal world.

And another thing

by Richard O'Hagan

And to think you thought I'd stopped griping along about Saturday's Tri-Nations opener.

To put it bluntly, when the bloody hell are the IRB going to do something about injury stoppages and blood replacements during games? When I was first introduced to the game, one of the selling points of rugby was that you played on irrespective of the number of dead and dying on the pitch. Not all grinding to a halt every time someone broke a fingernail was one of the things that distinguished rugby from those wimps that play soccer and I loved it.

On Saturday, we had the game being halted after about three minutes so that Adam Ashley-Cooper could have treatment on a hand that was already bandaged up. Stopping the game because someone has a sort pinkie is madness enough, but when it is to have treatment on a pre-existing problem then, frankly, the player should leave the pitch altogether.

And then there are the blood replacements. Once upon a time they didn't exist. Either you bled onto the pitch, or you left it and your team soldiered on with fourteen men until you'd had a few stitches. At the weekend, CJ van der Linde was on and off the pitch so often I wondered if he was on a bungee rope. At least two of those occasions were because the Springbok medics had failed to stitch up Grayling properly. In wendyball you don't get a blood replacement at all and I'm astonished that rugby is allowing itself to be in a less grown up position than that bunch of prima donnas.

More seriously, no blood replacements would mean that we never saw something as ridiculous as Bloodgate again.

In short, there's a World Cup coming up and I don't want to have to endure ten minutes of stoppages in every Wales game because someone scratches a bit of fake tan off of Gavin Henson, so get a grip, IRB, before it is too late.

Is the game in the North dying?

Sale owner, Brian Kennedy, made the rather miserable point the other week that rugby union is doomed in the North of England, but is this the case?

BBC correspondent Alastair Eykyn writes a thought-provoking analysis of the issue here, and it's well worth five minutes of your time.  What else are you going to do, work?

What I picked up from the piece is that while there will be differing views of the prognosis of the game in the top half of the country, one thing that no-one can disagree on is how far the North has fallen since the dawn of professionalism.

My conclusion is that this was inevitable given the strategy adopted by the RFU after 1995, when they decided to let sugar-daddies run clubs and the governing body would pick up the rest.  I'm not saying that benefactors have been bad for the game (ask fans of many clubs and they will tell you they are Godsend); but Rugby Union has always been about more than the clubs.  One can't help feeling that if the RFU had taken more of an Irish or NZ model, where the professional structure generally mirrored the amateur era that preceded it, then perhaps the North would not be suffering in such a way.

Julien Candelon, George Clancy, his linesman, Miles Harrison and Stuart Barnes are all a disgrace

What makes rugby a game we all adore is that it is a hard game played mostly within the parameters of what is acceptable.  However, as in all sports, sometimes certain players go beyond these parameters and when this happens, we who love the game have a responsibility to ruthlessly call such actions to account.  

In the Saints' magnificent victory over Perpignan, Julien Candelon hammered Lee Dickson's legs while the Northampton scrum-half was in the air, sending him spiralling like a green and black catherine wheel and causing his head and neck to clatter into the turf below his body with great force (see above).  Anyone who knows anything about the game knows this was deliberate; the act of a frustrated player reacting to his team being 17-0 behind in a massive game and taking his anger out on a soft target.

 

Granted, Candelon was given 10 minutes to think about what he did, but for this blog this was a weak decision by George Clancy and his touch judge, and this was disappointingly given justification by the toadying and obsequieous commentators Harrison and Barnes, who set off on the most disgraceful and apologist account of what happened.  Consider their comments after the incident:

Barnes (watching the replay, as Candelon shoulders Dickson's thighs in the air): "It's a yellow card, that's the right call.  It's a yellow."
Harrison: "It could have been much worse, but [Calderon's] almost trying to pull out, isn't he? To be fair to Candelon, having seen it again..
Barnes (interrrupting): "It's the right call, Clancy gets it absolutely right.  Candelon knows he's been stupid" 

"Trying to pull out"? Candelon, remember, is a winger - and a particularly small and nippy one at that.  Wingers of his type can, at any level of the game, change direction by means of a sidestep within one pace (as many of us forwards have been humiliated by) and a player at his level can stop dead in a boot's length.  To suggest that the Perpignan man could not have pulled out of clobbering Dickson is to ignore the facts to a level that borders on either infantile or (more likely) wilful.  Moreover, even if you leave aside this semi-tedious analysis it all comes down to the fact that EVERYONE KNOWS HE DID IT ON PURPOSE!  

The commentators fell into the unfortunate trap of being cheerleaders rather than rational correspondents.  We all love our game, and we all know the Big Cup is a fabulous competition, but we also expect those responsible for observing the game are honest about the unsavoury aspects and incidents.  It is mealy-mouthed comments such as those above that give those who see rugby as a haven for thuggery ammunition to fire, but we in the game must be the harshest judges of it else we do it a disservice.

Anyone who feels I am overreacting should take a look at Calderon as he sits in the sin-bin.  His countenance is not that of someone disappointed at being sent from the field, instead his eyes betray  the thoughts of a man terrified that he may have maimed an opponent via a deliberate act of foul play.

The commentators should have the integrity to call it as such.

Amazing Sports Illiustrated piece on Gareth Thomas

One of the strange things about American sport is that despite a lot of their games being baffling and faintly ridiculous, their sports journalism is some of the best in the world.

Here is an amazing example of this as Sports Illustrated tells Gareth Thomas's story of being a gay man in the world of rugby and beyond, right from the very beginning as an 18-year-old, through his outing of himself to his state of mind now.

It's quite a long piece, but believe me it's worth it.

When rugby shirts went bad

 In years gone by, you knew where you were with rugby shirts.  They were in block colours and had not changed since public schoolboys took time out of desperately trying not to engage in sexual activity with each other and created the game of rugby instead.  

It was so simple back then.  England wore white, Wales red, Ireland green, Scotland navy and France royal blue; all of them had a badge on, a white collar and that was that.   It was also very rare that you would know who the manufacturer was as there was no logo, and anyone looking to the label for enlightenment would be led to believe that all shirts were made by a company called: "Large, Wash Colours Separately"

However, at some point in the early to mid-1990s this all changed.  The spectre of professionalism was looming large, and most unions and sports clothing manufacturers were sensing money to be made from the punters and so shirts began to change - and not for the better - as the marketing men moved in.  We have actually managed to get hold of the meeting minutes from each manufacturer at that period and here is a typical example after the jump.

Wales Kit Meet, 1992.

Mike Kristiansen outlined the proposal that we need to make kits more appealing and modern to consumers in order to boost revenue for both ourselves and the WRU.  This will need to identify with the potential consumer, capturing their imagination so that they not only wear the shirt of their nation with pride, but become stakeholders in the our brand, the lifestyle and the ethos of being winners. MK then opened the floor to the creative team.

Ethan Brownstick said, "Shall we just add some ugly stipes and shit to the arms?"

All agreed, meeting closed.

Thus it was that rugby kits were changed forever.  Only to return to something like the beauty of the basic kits some years later when some crap-haired and trendy spectacled marketing monkey went down the 'classic/retro' route.   

England's classic white was replaced by this monstrosity in the 1991 World Cup, closely followed by this minger, this disgrace and so on it went until this hate crime in 2007. 

Wales went for this green-collared, hoopy-sleeved nightmare, before realising the error of their ways and returning to some semblance of normality by the 2000s

Scotland somehow ended up having purple stripes in their shirt, before succumbing to a level of shirt-detail nonsense normally associated with Stade Francais.

France went all tricolour-striped on us, while Ireland thankfully resisted putting any gold or other daftness on their shirts for longer than anyone, but then caved and added white arm trims and side panels in the early 2000s.

Professionalism has brought many things that are good for the game;  Ooerly-fussy shirts made from fabrics with made up names like 'dri-fit' and 'pro-armour', that roughly translate as 'a bit like a pair of tights, only manly and that' are not one one them.  Especially seeing as some of them now retail and upwards of £90.  NINETY QUID!!

What exactly is a "gameplan"?

 England players talk about them a lot in post-match interviews and we take the piss out of players with a version of them, but what do people mean by a gameplan? 

Yoda Ashton (remember him?) has been quoted this week as saying, ""One of the things I am constantly battling against is the dreaded word gameplan," he said, "That is where everything is prescribed from phase one to six or seven. By doing that, no one ever learns to understand the way the game is played, the way one aspect impacts on another."  His definition - gameplan as phase-by-phase directives - is an interesting, if not entirely correct, one.

Many people, particularly those who have to watch England, refer to the word "gameplan" with the the kind of disgust normally reserved for the c-word in a primetime TV slot.  As if it is something to be reviled; a one-word summation of all that is wrong with the over-drilled, gym-monkey infested, zero-creativity modern approach to rugby. This is wrong.  Any team at any level of any sport must have a "plan", and this plan has several layers.

The first job of a head coach (team manager, Principal Strategy Enabler, or whatever they call themselves these days) is to formulate an approach to the game for his team.  To select a simple decision: are you a rucking side or a mauling side?  If you are a rucking side do you look to ruck through a repetitive number of fast phases via the forwards or do you look to ruck fast and go wide as soon as possible?  etc etc. Once you have come to the conclusion you must then get the coaching team in place to ensure the players have the skills to carry out this general approach.  As a coach you will also agree the creative freedom you want your players to have and tailor your whole coaching strategy to this.  This can take years to reach fruition, especially if you are looking to turn around a culture a la Clive Woodward. 

This is your approach to the game, your philosophy, your strategy.  This never changes as you should have the confidence in your approach to keep working at it to get it and the players right.

Assuming you have all that sorted (no small feat), below this sits your gameplan, or more specifically gameplans.  Unlike your overall approach, your gameplans will change for every game and every opponent.  For example, one team may have a defensively weak 10-12 channel and so you will request your 9 and 10 to focus attacks there; or perhaps one team have a particularly weak ruck defence, thus you will work your carrying forwards into that area on repeated phases, and so on.  

However, the worst thing any coach can do is lay down too many "patterns". Those who have played know the type - e.g. "we always go three drives blindside then we go open to the backs", which then leads to an overlap going begging because the forwards are taking in their second, robotic blind-side drive when the ball should have gone.  It is this approach which is too prevalent in too many teams, certainly in the Guinness Prem and moreso with England.  

Having no plan and believing that somehow good players will figure it out is stupid, but equally stupid is drilling and planning all spark out of a team.  It seems an obvious thing to say but the evidence of this happening is all to prevalent.

It is this micro-managed approach to the game that Ashton is railing against in the quote above, but a gameplan need not be like this.  It is not the idea of a gameplan that is wrong, just the gameplans many coaches seem to be using.  

Julien Dupuy's ban appeal

Stade Francais and Marc Lievremont are not happy that Julien Dupuy is banned for six months.  This is understandable as he is arguably the form scrum-half in Europe at the minute and his absence from his club and country will hit them hard. So what they are actually doing is taking the usual scoundrel's way out by bleating about technicalities.  The fact is that they have a case under French law for the decision to be reviewed, that will undoubtedly lead to a reduction in the ban and they are pursuing it. Shame on them.

At a time when the entire game is abhorring the practise of eye-gouging, and the authorities finally hand out something resembling a proper sanction, France chooses this time to focus on the detail rather than the principle. 

Let's be honest, the game in France has always had the worst reputation for this practice - John Eales threatened to take the Wallabies off the field in the 1999 World Cup Final, such was the extent of the gouging of his team -  and this was a clear opportunity for them to show to the world that they believe Dupuy acted in a despicable and cowardly manner.

Instead, we have Stade owner Guzzardi uttering crap like "The ERC wanted to make an example of a symbolic player of Stade Francais and of the French team which has never had a disciplinary problem."  No, the ERC wanted to make an example that gouging has no place in the game and those that are caught doing it are going to get their arses kicked. Gouging is a violent criminal act that should shame the perpetrator, and no-one should be offering public mealy-mouthed defences. 

The loss of Dupuy will hit his teams hard, but not as hard as it would hit Stephen Ferris to lose sight in one eye.  I know this didn't happen, but the fact is that this is more by luck than design, because if you stick your fingers in a person's eye socket you have no idea what the outcome will be.  Given the evidence above, six months was probably too light.

Dupuy, his club and FFR should be thankful he didn't blind anyone, shut their yap and take the sanction on the chin.  Or in the eye.

Rugby Union is dead, apparently.

Paul Rees, a man unique among rugby correspondents in that he doesn't seem to like rugby much, is today once again lamenting the death of the game.  Move along everyone, nothing to see here but the chalked outline of William Webb Ellis...

His argument is valid enough on at least some of the Guinness Premiership numbers: there are half as many tries this year as there were at the same time in 2007-8, and 2.6 and 4.7 tries per match respectively; but less convincing on others, the comparison of drops and pens between the same years are not that different.

To be fair to Paul the Misery, he is not the only one wringing his hands about the state of the game, with issues being brought up about player bulk, lack of creativity and excessive kicking coming from all sides since the summer.  Many are blaming the rules, but is it entirely justified?  I'm not sure.

In the midst of many games that have admittedly been utter dreck this autumn, there have been some corkers; Leicester vs Ospreys, most Northampton matches, France vs SA, Ireland vs Aus, even Wales vs Arg showed some class (I'm sure you could name others).  Surely, if it was all the fault of the rules then no games would be any good? 

It cannot be denied that the new protocols at the breakdown have caused problems, but the fact still remains that if you get enough people to the breakdown you will still win the ball just as before.  It has always been the case that no player should take contact when isolated and while the protocols have made this more important this should not be an impossible obstacle for coaches to overcome.  Instead of whining about it, get your players operating in tighter units, look at using pods - mostly simply accept the fact that for years it was piss-easy to recycle your own possession and now you are being asked to earn your money.  Likewise, the players should look at the themselves and trust their ability rather than taking the coward's route with the boot.

Rees' analysis also makes the mistake of focusing on the Guinnes Premiership, falling into the common trap of believing that the English domestic league or England national team is somehow the appropriate laboratory sample to use in the diagnosis of the health of world rugby.  It is not.  The Premiership is suffering from a combination of organised defences and a particular crop of players who are a bit on the creatively mediocre side.  Funnily enough, teams that have creative players - Saints and Irish for example -  are creating things; teams which do not are not - what a miracle, eh?

What is the common thread in the England rugby team's crapness?

The years since 2003 have not exactly been a picnic for England fans; or if it has been a picnic it is one at which it consistently drizzles, the sandwiches are all chicken paste and the occasional wild animal turns up to savage you and your kids. There have been some sunny intervals of course - World Cup final in 2007, and some recognisable improvement in this year's Six Nations - but all in all, this period has been a pride-swallowing siege for all who follow the red rose. 

The years immediately after 2003 saw of a number of pivotal persons retiring or suffering long-term injuries, plus the loss of Clive Woodward. Since 2006 there has been no such ready-made excuse. 
 
Leaving aside RWC 07, when every other team played into England’s hands by allowing a slow, forwards and kick dominated strategy to dominate the tournament, in the last three years England have consistently failed in the part of the game that matters most: securing decent possession, particularly at ruck.

The reasons for this are many: lack of penetrating runs, poor rucking technique, lack of ideas around the fringe, the endless pick-and-gos; I could go on. Securing ball, even in this modern era is still primarily the job of the forwards, something they have signally failed to do in three years. Who is to blame for this is very simple in my eyes; it’s the bloke responsible for England’s forwards since 2006 – John Wells.

If you accept that this is the case - and I’d be interested to hear any arguments in support of him as I can’t think of any - then it begs the additional question of why he is still in the job.  

Up until this year you could put his survival down to the turmoil raging around him, with the turnover of head coaches happening at such a rate that the powers that be felt stability in the second coaching layer was probably sensible. However, since Johnson was appointed as the long-term coach last year then this argument looks increasingly shaky. Given that, with the possible exception of Scotland, England’s forwards look the worst in Europe most of the time and last Saturday against the Wallabies was yet another game to add to the litany of soul-splintering failures of recent times, you have to ask what it would take for him to lose his job?

I have no desire to see people sacked when there is a long-term strategy that they are part of. But, if a man who has presided over not a single iota of consistent improvement in three years is part of your long-term plan then surely your plan is a SHIT one? Only Martin Johnson knows the answer to that and we can only hope that he is considering his forwards coaching options very carefully, otherwise it's more chicken paste and drizzle in the run up to the next World Cup.