Time we demanded more from players
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THE other weekend – although it could probably be any weekend – I watched two entertaining games in the space of 48 hours as the Gallagher Premiership cranked back into action. There was Bristol letting rip against Northampton with a seven-try barrage on the Friday night and then Bath finishing strongly to put Sale away at The Rec on Sunday.
At various stages in both games forward passes seemed almost mandatory. Bristol's first try by Harry Randall came off a clear forward pass from AJ MacGinty while at least two of Bath's tries also featured forward passes, the most glaring being that from Finn Russell to send Matt Gallagher sprinting home. There was also incidentally another forward pass from Russell in the build up to his own drop goal in the second half. Officialdom chose to turn a Nelsonian eye despite, in the case of the Bath-Sale game, Austin Healey screaming blue murder in the nearby commentary box.
Now I'm not going to lecture you yet again on what is and isn't a forward pass and how, despite all the pseudo scientists and self-proclaimed clever clogs who try and brainwash you with mendacious twaddle, it is perfectly possible to pass the ball backwards legally as the game managed for the best part of 140 years before some coaches and teams – mainly the Aussies – decided it was too difficult and tiresome to master such a skill and invented flat ball passes. From that moment onward it has been a downward spiral with the game's rulers contorting the laws and their interpretation horribly to legitimise what everybody can see is a forward pass.
One day soon we will devote an entire podcast to the subject but, take it from me, it's a core skill that can be learnt and perfected and I have never spoken to a referee yet who privately won't tell you exactly the same. They know it's all nonsense which is why some are so erratic with their decisions. Occasionally, their gnawing conscience gets the better of them and they ping a pass – clearly forward – that they've been happily waving through for the previous 60 minutes. I've even, bizarrely, seen a few recently get so confused or perhaps ridden with guilt that they ping a textbook pass that did genuinely go backward.
No, my main points today are philosophical, well we do like to raise the tone occasionally on a Sunday morning.
Firstly, what is it that the game fears? Why has there been this omerta to allow clear forward passes? My enjoyment of both the games mentioned would not have been reduced one jot if the forward passes and knock ons had been refereed and the tries and dropped goal never happened. They were both entertaining matches, laden with legitimate tries to relish. We didn't – and don't ever – need bogus scores that inflate the score lines artificially. I have never met anybody who measures their enjoyment of a game on cumulative points and tries. Not one.
Why the bloody hell do we do it? In cricket when Don Bradman strode to the crease for his last innings at the Oval in 1948 needing just four runs to average 100 in all Test innings the umpire didn't suddenly call no ball when Eric Hollies bowled him for nought second ball. I guarantee you even the hard bitten Bradman would rather have retired with a genuine average of 99.94 than to be gifted a career average of 100. He would have scrubbed that last innings totally from his mind, an embarrassment.
When we get a thrilling 37-stroke rally at Wimbledon between an outsider and say Federer or Djokovic and the outsider is an inch long with his overhead smash, with all the court to play with, we don't give the outsider the point because he is brave as a lion and deserved it. If he were to be falsely given the point, the rally would be worthless.
Why is rugby so needy and chronically unsure of itself that it fears to take this approach? In rugby, so often, the decisive or final pass is often cringingly forward. And yet remains unchecked.
For me an obvious forward pass or knock on in the buildup cheapens the game overall. It is fraudulent. Everybody deep down, even the scorers themselves, knows it wasn't legitimate just as players know whether they have touched down properly or not, whether they were half an inch short of the line or not. Observing such an orchestrated denial of the obvious is getting weird.
As a journalist and writer over the decades – and I know I'm not alone with this – I can't bear to look at a past article if for whatever reason it includes a whopping typo, an erroneous fact or nuance which I got wrong, a misleading headline or a wrongly captioned picture. It makes me physically ill. No matter what the other merits of the piece I would rather it didn't exist.
If you want to witness this in its ultimate form you should be a fly on the wall when a writer takes delivery of 12 pristine author's copies of their latest tome. There can be no joy until we have scoured the book for mistakes and typos and sod's law dictates that you often find one on the first page you turn to, even though you and others will have proofread that page a dozen times before signing it off.
It's an agonising moment, you have poured two or three years of your best work into the project and there for everybody to see – or so you think – is a glaring mistake. You have fallen at the first hurdle. Briefly you wish all copies of the book, even at this late stage, could be pulped! And if you find more mistakes your day, week, is utterly ruined. Indeed I have written at least two well received books which I will never reread because of mistakes and bloopers therein.
Now you might think that is an extreme form of perfectionism and you are probably right but in my experience it's absolutely commonplace in sport where an almost OCD pursuit of perfection is one of the main driving forces.
And this is why rugby's premeditated indulgence of forward passes – and I have no doubt it comes from the top – does nothing but undermine the sport. Every fraudulent try detracts from those brilliant scores that were wholly the result of legal play, exquisite, practiced skill under enormous pressure. I'm thinking France's first try against England by Nolann Le Garrec or perhaps Lorenzo Pani's effort in Cardiff, the result of incredible passing skills under pressure. And others.
Those who have mastered their profession – their art as they will look on it – are diminished because too much allowance is made for those who haven't.
It's an incredibly slippery road we are nudging down. Only last week we learned that World Rugby are wondering if teams even need to throw the ball in straight at lineouts. Excuse me. Why ever not? That is a core skill, not an option. The last straight feed at scrum time was recorded about the same time as the last Labour government; some touchdowns are clearly nothing of the sort even by the current flimsy illogical definition; hookers stand two feet infield when throwing in to make life easier; quick taps are taken in a different parish to where they're awarded; refs are colluding with kickers when they run the clock down by giving them their own bespoke countdown. Unbelievable.
The dumbing down of rugby will be its death and frankly the forward pass is probably Custer's last stand. Not being able to pass forward, i.e. having to pass the ball in a manner that doesn't move it towards the opposition try line has defined and shaped rugby and makes it special. Lose that and the game is up.
So let's stop being so pathetic and needy. It's really unattractive. Let's demand more, not less, from our players. It's what they are paid for and they are all talented enough to meet the challenge.
