Loose Pass: Raw deals, headlocks and hope for Wales

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with duties of care at high speed, another bad habit for the lawmakers to look at, Wales’ youth and Ireland’s identity crisis…

Defenders getting a raw deal

A brace of cards dished out this weekend showed consistency (and I am told there were others) but they also showed just how difficult it is to be a rugby player and stay clean under current law interpretations.

Charlie Ewels of Bath was yellow-carded for being upright when Adam Radwan ran into him, while Georgia flanker Beka Saghinadze was yellow-carded when his arm happened to be in the way of Justin Tipuric’s fall.

Neither player had remotely on their mind anything other than making a fair and hard tackle at speed. Neither swung his arm high, nor charged with shoulder, nor looked not to wrap. Yet both ended up making contact to their opponents’ heads and leaving them dazed at best. And both saw their actions start at red cards in the analysis, with mitigation downgrading both to yellow.

Lucky? Perhaps. Yet also very unlucky. Neither could have foreseen the actions of their opponent – in Radwan’s case a sudden step inside to initiate head-on contact, in Tipuric’s a headfirst fall from a tackle – and neither had his body in such a position that head contact was inevitable.

Indeed, in Ewels’ case, you could argue that Radwan was the one initiating the head-to-head contact with his change of direction. What, you could reasonably wonder, would have been the outcome had Radwan’s head proved to be harder than Ewels’? Or what if Tipuric’s arm had struck Saghinadze’s head while he was falling? Also red cards to be downgraded?

Both Nigel Owens and Wayne Barnes have, in the past, insisted on watching videos of moments such as these at full speed, so as not to forget how little time players might have to react in defence to the unexpected. This, we think, also needs to be taken into account as mitigation in these analyses.

This isn’t to say that the current drive to eradicate head contacts is wrong in any way, but the pendulum, in these two incidents, just swung a little too far over to damning the defender for something he could do nothing about.

But while on the subject of danger…

It was a tackle by Jamie George which provokes this part, but there have been countless examples down the weeks.

An Ireland player drove into George with head and upper body lowered, classic hard low drive height, around George’s waist. George himself was upright and had little time to adjust, certainly not to go any lower than his opponent.

Contact made and George, travelling backwards, naturally put his hand under the chest of the oncoming opponent and steeled himself to counter-drive. The problem at this moment is that he now had his opponent in a headlock.

https://twitter.com/11Christophernn/status/1330181363044069376

Which happens. See above paragraph about things happening at speed. But George’s headlock lasted for a good four or five seconds, and continued as both players went to ground; only after the two had hit the deck did George let go.

There’s been a fair few of these recently. You can argue that it is not the defender’s fault initially because of the respective body positions, but we’d like to see the holds be policed better. A simple ‘neck release’ call would suffice, followed by sanctions for non-compliers. As would reviews called from above for potential foul play. After all, grabbing someone by the neck and scrapping with him is just as dangerous as clashing with his head isn’t it?

A ray of hope for Wales

Last week this column talked about Wayne Pivac either having the wrong personnel for the plan, or having the wrong plan for the personnel. But the youngsters on Saturday, while hardly being outstanding, did at least show that there are enough bright young sparks around for Wales to have a go at changing generations as well as playing culture.

Both Callum Sheedy and Louis-Rees Zammit showed enough spark, while the all-action back-row helped keep the pace up. Nick Tompkins continues to develop positively.

Pivac has endured a miserable run, but there was enough on show on Saturday to make you think that he could turn the youngsters into a team playing the way he wants to play far sooner than he could turn the old heads.

The game against England has the potential to be a nightmare with England in such form and Wales so out of form, but it would be a far larger nightmare were it to be the old heads under new leadership to get a stuffing. The case for giving the new generation a go, in a game which is important, but not as important as, say, the Six Nations, is growing.

How many proud provinces of Ireland?

Good as England certainly were, something is amiss with Ireland. And although pointing the finger at the imported faction is an easy out, you would be hard-pushed to find any one of the ‘residency rulers’ who played well on Saturday.

One review of Ireland’s performance noted that the team was not summoning the fury of recent times, but this does look like a team finding it tough to grow together. And the newbies: all of them are late twenties or early thirties, none of them remotely near international selection at home. It doesn’t taste of forward planning or attention to internal development process.

Does Ireland really not have any emerging players, any young wingers or half-backs or locks with high potential? We don’t believe that. Ireland’s national anthem sings of the four proud provinces of Ireland, but the Irish management and players on Saturday came from four different countries. How can that generate a good national team?

We can talk about the idiocy of residency rules all we like, but here, in our view, is a good example of a team’s identity, founded on togetherness and history, being eroded by a purely professional and technical selection policy.

Loose Pass compiled by Lawrence Nolan