Loose Pass: Ireland did not ‘pay the proper price’ for Garry Ringrose offence and England ‘riding waves of luck’ in Six Nations
Ireland centre Garry Ringrose received a 20-minute red card against Wales.
This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with red card advantage, mouthguard readings and England’s false dawn in the Six Nations…
The fudge melts
Loose Pass does not believe it is going against the grain when we say we are not, never have been and never will be, a fan of the 20-minute red card. Despite the protestations of the lawmakers that permanent reds can still be awarded for serious foul play, it still doesn’t fit.
Wales might look back on it with particular frustration this week. When Garry Ringrose charged at Ben Thomas with his head up, causing one of those head on head collisions that will never be looked at sympathetically by the bunkers, the score was 10-6 to Ireland. By the time Bundee Aki came on to replace the dispatched Ringrose, the score was 18-13 to Wales and it was a well-deserved lead; Ireland looked properly rattled.
It’s easy to go all coulda woulda shoulda on this, but Wales quite clearly had a far better chance of winning that game against 14 men than against 15, never mind the fact that the replacement for the expelled player is a world-class centre who is surely a shoo-in for the Lions this summer. Ireland essentially suffered very little for Ringrose’s indiscretion bar an extra 10 minutes with a man down; there’ll be many who said they may even have benefitted from it in the final stages of the game.
And exactly how egregious does an offence need to be for a red card to be permanent instead of 20-minute anyway? There’s no suggestion that Ringrose was out to nobble Thomas, but at the same time the technique was both aggressive and negligently poor. He’ll be suspended for a couple of weeks and he’ll be standing on the naughty step in tackle school, but the team has not taken one for him at all as a result.
The red cards dished out for head contact have been criticised for being both too stringent and for skewing the balance of games. But officials and TMOs have become much better at picking out poor technique from accidental collisions over the months and seasons; the stringency has become less of a problem than it was.
Skewing games? That’s one argument, there’s another perfectly rational argument that the poor tackle technique from Ringrose should have opened a door for Wales to take advantage, but that the 20-minute red card slammed it shut again. That’s a skewed game too, where a team does not pay the proper price for a player’s misdemeanours.
The bottom line is to stop fudging the issue and focus on getting better at working out what deserves a red card and what does not. Right now we’ve a red card with no red card effect, which does not sit right.
The mouthguard never lies?
About 15 minutes into the clash at the Principality, Wales prop Nicky Smith headed to the touchline at the bidding of the medics for a head injury assessment.
He was furious. He held up his mouthguard and uttered a number of choice words about ‘this thing’ (expletive deleted) before heading off, passing the assessment and re-joining the field of play a few minutes later.
It would be intriguing to see the data from the mouthguards. How, for example, did Smith’s mouthguard register a worrisome collision but Thomas’, in his collision with Ringrose, did not? What was the collision in question?
How, for that matter, was Thomas later not pulled aside for a bit of a chat and follow-the-finger action anyway? Having seen the slo-mo of it enough times while Ringrose was on trial by camera, it certainly looked like it was a rattler.
There’s no question that the data mouthguards are a good additional barrier to head injuries and anything that moves us in the right direction there needs to be maintained. But there was no obvious collision in which Smith was crunched any more or less than any other player in any one of the numerous rucks or scrums beforehand. The ideal is for the data and the events to be proven synchronous before players start to be pulled out of games seemingly at random.
England riding a wave
There’s another universe in which passes stick to Antoine Dupont’s normally-reliable hands and Finn Russell’s kicks go between the posts. In that universe, England are 0 from 3 and – given the ructions ongoing in the club game at the moment – in a full crisis, with masses of sharpened knives poised behind Steve Borthwick‘s back.
But that’s somewhere else. England in this universe are mastering the knack of winning even when not playing well, of racking up points even when the attack looks blunt, of securing the decisions at key moments even when they are not on top in the game or its flow.
Those are crucial knacks to the best teams (ask Ireland). With a tired-looking Italy next up and if France do England a favour in Dublin, Mr. Borthwick’s men could be playing Wales for a – admittedly long – shot at the Six Nations title on the final weekend.
Such waves of luck can be ridden and used to get to safer shores. But at some point, England will need to start winning games as well as being lucky enough to play teams who lose them.
