Loose Pass: Cyclical slump and proportionate forgiveness

Adam Kyriacou

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with cyclical boredom, a suggestion for eligibility rules, proportionate forgiveness and fine lines between frustration and adulation…

The low point in the cycle

If you believed everything you heard, you’d be forgiven for being just plain miserable the whole time. There’s no fans, no sense in the new laws, no room for creativity and everyone is playing boring territorial rugby – in fact, rugby as we knew it is dead in the water.

The actual truth is a little different. Granted, many of those criticisms – not least the soulless melancholy of grandstand games in empty arenas – are fully valid. The new laws do make it easier to disrupt rucks for the defence which means multi-phase build-ups are much harder to achieve, while also giving aggressive defences impetus to, well, be more aggressive.

Teams are indeed kicking a lot; parts of the Italy-Wales match on Saturday, when watched through a wide angle lens, were comical in how the forward dozens of each team moved back and forth like waves on an ocean as the kicks sailed hither and thither over their heads. This irritating obsession with elongating a ruck to allow scrum-halves to box-kick slows the game down further.

Yet we are only a year out from one of the better World Cups in terms of quality of play, quantity of tries and deliverance of drama and not that much has been changed. So what’s gone wrong?

Eddie Jones talks about rugby going through cycles (among many, many other things), while teams change staff, both playing and coaching. And upsets to rhythm such as corona, where players have their training and preparation cycle completely cut off, virtually guarantee that when the restart comes, caution and safety will be the watchwords.

Corona notwithstanding, rugby the year after World Cups generally tends to be a bit ugly. The early stages of the 2016 Six Nations were a prime example. Changes in coaching always lead either to safe and solid strategies or disjointedness initially as other, more adventurous strategies take time to bed in. When rules are changed or enforced more stringently, as is often the case around a World Cup, they are normally done so to benefit the attacking team. So the first coach who ramps up input is the defensive coach, because whatever the rules, defence wins you the championships – plus which, as we have seen this November, new coaches are quickly up against the wall when teams stop winning.

The point in this? Don’t be too hard on the game in general just now. All the protagonists have gone through an immense reset and are understandably in a siege mentality. Both Andy Farrell and Wayne Pivac have seen their attempts to start their processes obliterated by the pandemic and are still trying to piece them back together. Gregor Townsend has been less cautious, but he has little to lose. Jones absolutely HAD to win, England were never going to sparkle on that basis alone. And in the Premiership, clubs still, ridiculously, don’t know if they’ll be relegated or not but have to play as though they will.

It’ll take longer for the resets and for the new coaches bed in because of the pandemic, take longer for the chinks in the newly-prepared defences to appear, but the game will get there.

Project limits?

Clearly, the habit of unions cherry picking youngsters from other countries and setting them up in digs long enough to fulfil the World Rugby eligibility rules – that stomach-turning term is hiring a Project Player – is a practice here to stay.

The new extended period of residency may change the habit, but a cynic would look at it and suggest that the only habit that might change is the age at which the youngsters are enticed away from their homeland, or give up on representing their homeland and look for another country to play for.

So here’s a suggestion: why not limit the number of residency-qualified (so not through either parent or grandparent) players per international team to three?

Something needs to be looked at here: international rugby loses something of its flavour when there are more vans than macs in the Scottish team…

The way forward

It was, of course, an appalling thing to have done, and Pablo Matera, Guido Petti and Santiago Socino know it. The words of Matera in particular: “At that moment I did not imagine who I was going to become. Today I have to take charge of what I said nine years ago,” are very much the crux of this particular matter.

Taking charge is right. Matera and his mates have been censured. He missed a crucial game for the Pumas and he’s going to face some music back home; while ending his suspension the UAR also made it clear that the matter is not yet actually laid to rest. Those casting the UAR as shirking responsibility should wait and see what the UAR actually does when the team returns home – although to be fair, it needs to be a lot more forceful than calling the errant tweets imprudent.

Yet nobody should be eternally damned nearly a decade later for what they said as an impressionable teenager. What they should be judged on is both what they did and how they respond to the situation. Cancelling the players outright is not the way forward. Heaping fury, scorn and condemnation on them is inevitable in the very short term, but it’s not the way forward as a solution either: fighting shame with anger will produce only negatives.

Hopefully the punishments coming will ensure the players both feel suitable retribution and shame for their actions, but – as you would hope a guardian would do with a wayward teenager – also give them one shot, one shot only, at redeeming themselves and being better people. It is possible.

Fine lines

Three matches, three draws, three shots at goal in the last few minutes of each match, none successful.

Dave Rennie is under a bit pf pressure in Australia, and given a slightly indifferent record of won one, drawn three, lost two, it’s reasonably understandable (although please refer back to section one of this column).

But you also have to wonder if Rennie won’t go out for a coffee with Reece Hodge during summer recess and plan a long schedule of long-range goal-kicking practice under pressure… would Rennie be under so much pressure if his team was 4-0-2 this November?

Loose Pass compiled by Lawrence Nolan

 

Argentina