Loose Pass

Editor

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with provocative acts and empty seats…

Silly boy…

Rarely does Loose Pass find it within itself to sympathise with James Haskell. After all, when his own website proclaims him ‘one of the most recognizable sportsmen of his generation’, you can merrily move on and assume that ego will protect him from most possible miseries.

And as he exited stage left on Sunday with the mirth of Marler ringing in his ears and, no doubt, the colour of Marler’s ludicrous bleached Mohawk burning on his retinae, it was tough not to look at the pout and the stomp and the swearing (remarkably easy to lip-read) and let out a great guffaw of schadenfreude.

Haskell’s coach has sprung to his defence – a ruse which we’re willing to bet has a lot more to do with Dai Young’s desire to have a pop at referee Andrew Jackson  than any actual belief Haskell might be innocent.

“If someone rips your hat off and squirts water in your face, what do you expect,” bemoaned Young.

Well, here’s a youtube of it all.

To be fair, Marler does have a good grab at Haskell’s hat and he does squirt the water. What Haskell and Young are failing to talk about is that it was Haskell who seemed to fire the first shots (if you look at the replay at around 0.48 – why on earth did Haskell go nuts there?)

Following all that, Marler does give his bottle a little squirt at 1.04. But we defy anyone to find a single trace of water actually moistening the godly Haskell visage. Maybe it just entered his eyesight range, or maybe it simply dampened the ego that marches ahead of him.

Either way, there’s a lot more in Haskell’s actions than Marler’s meriting the yellow card in that sequence, and there’s more than a whiff of sour grapes about the protests from the Wasps camp.

But Young and Haskell are not all wrong in what they say either. While a squirt of water is stretching it a bit, we have mentioned before that we’re a little tired of seeing those niggly acts of provocation – holding people in at rucks after the rucks have finished is the chief one – go unnoticed and unpunished, especially when they’re retaliated against.

There’s a lot of video work goes into foul play reviewing these days. It would be good if the video could be used to stamp out problems at source, rather than at symptom.

Where are they all?

The start of a new era! The onset of a cross-hemisphere top-level tournament! Internationals sprinkled across the turf! New territories being opened up and ‘exposed’ to the beautiful game! And if you were sitting in the back row of the top tier, you could hear the footsteps of the players on the grass…

The official attendance for the Kings’ match against Leinster was given at 3,000, clearly a figure that included ball-boys, security staff, hot-dog vendors and stadium mice. In a 46,000-capacity stadium, the effect was more than a little eerie.

Across in the good old US of A, a paltry 6,271 souls pitched up for the Premiership On Tour showdown between Saracens and Newcastle, while the Cheetahs did at least draw a crowd in Bloemfontein. Paying punters, however, they were not.

There seems to be a bit of an obsession with new territory at the moment, which is leading some people to make some rather rash and poorly-thought out decisions. Chester, Pennsylvania, where the Falcons met Sarries, is neither a pleasant place to be, nor easy to get to from big brother Philadephia.

And even if it were, the planners that be did not do their research. America’s club rugby season is split into two halves around a long winter break from Thanksgiving to sometime in March, meaning late September is when those stakeholders more active in the game are tearing up some turf of their own somewhere else. Many who might have gone on Saturday did not have the chance.

In a week when rugby was given its best-possible shoe-horn towards global superiority with news of its re-inclusion into the Olympics, these grand visions and daring thrusts by tournaments and teams do not seem to be having much effect. Super Rugby has actively suffered, the Pro 14 is not looking healthier, while this game, wedged into the middle of the NFL, baseball, College Football and local rugby seasons in an awkward location at a strange time of day, did not do the Premiership any favours.

Expansion is good, of course. But fueled by TV money rather than actual participants, it is not real. If we’re serious about these international fixtures and teams, they need better planning and better PR.

Loose Pass compiled by former Planet Rugby Editor Danny Stephens