Loose Pass: Sticking plaster solutions, ended Rugby World Cup dreams and Michael Leitch’s red card

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with sticking plaster solutions, ended dreams and the unavoidable perils of being a tackler…

The onset of central contracts?

What is strange about the Anthony Watson deal is not that it has happened, it is that it is not happening more.

Perhaps it still will. Either way, the news that the Premiership is going to take block breaks while the internationals are on is good news, and it quite clearly paves the way for central contracts for England players to be paid directly from the union for those blocks, freeing up some much-needed capital for the clubs.

The reality will be far more complicated, including things like insurance. But the premise is there.

For England rugby right now, this would be the right direction. The economy in the UK is not getting better soon, sponsors are not queuing up while the soccer Premier League moves from strength to strength, English clubs and club rugby does not have the pull to be able to compete with the Top 14 or Japan.

Had the RFU not intervened, Watson would quite probably have been forced to look to either of those leagues. Wales is suffering the same problem – worse in many ways – but with English clubs continuing to feel the pinch it cannot be long before players begin to depart, not least with many of them maybe playing their last World Cup this year.

Central contracts would be a good start; if the clubs are struggling, the RFU does have deeper pockets. But going back to clubs and their struggles, we come back to the hows and whys of rugby’s dwindling fan base as well.

It’s a little hard to look past the cuts to funding of the grass-roots game, coupled with the ongoing high-profile concerns about player safety and the RFU’s muddled response. While in France they are busy getting close to a fully-professional third tier, England’s second tier has all but disappeared as a viable professional option, while the club and community game continues to face dwindling participation.

There were more than 15,000 empty seats at this year’s Premiership Final, while recent data crunched by sports branding company Horizm show that clubs’ – and the Premiership’s – engagement rate with fans was down this season.

You’d be hard-pushed to find a rugby fan in England who believes the RFU is running the game for the good of the clubs and the wider audience at the moment, while you’d be just as hard-pushed to find a club which reckons its financial outlook is anything other than challenging.

In which case we might argue that, especially if England can make a decent World Cup run and create a few more heroes a la Marcus Smith, the RFU centrally contracting those handsome chaps to keep them in England and in the Premiership might be money wisely spent in the first instance.

So we’ll see. But it would not surprise Loose Pass if the contract offered to Watson was the first of several such over the next couple of years.

Wasn’t this a thing of the past?

Anybody not Welsh would have been more than a little excited to consider a full-strength Fiji heading into the World Cup.

The Fijians disappointed four years ago, but with a squad full of Top 14 and Premiership stars, a good run of form and a well-appointed coaching team, it is a decent bet that Fiji could salt Wales’ current leaking wounds in Bordeaux in September.

What we did not expect is that, once again, Fijian international players would be forced to choose financial security over World Cup dreams. Yet it seems that there will be no Peceli Yato in Fiji’s back-row, which is a terrible shame.

✖️ Peceli Yato.

🇫🇯 He is the second player to rule himself out of #RWC2023.https://t.co/kWWWjaCtmh

— Planet Rugby (@PlanetRugby) July 22, 2023

There is no official reason for Yato’s departure from the squad, but unless something very untoward has happened on the side, it would seem that Yato is forced to choose between representing his country and earning his keep at Clermont, as is unequivocally the case with Api Ratuniyarawa.

The realities are what they are. But it is not a good look for the game that one of the best players in his position is held down by financial shortage from going to a World Cup. Loose Pass once held a conversation with Sireli Bobo in 2007, who was facing the same problem; the look of misery on his face as he told the news was unforgettable (the story did have a happy end as he was later called up as a squad joker, but there was no such luck in 2011).

We have, as a sport, to get past this somehow. That the Pacific Islands, from where some 25 per cent of all professional rugby players have heritage, are now getting stronger as a result of the new eligibility rules is a huge positive. Yet still we are in a situation where not all the best players are available. It has to change.

Leitch falls foul of dynamics

Yes, it was shoulder to head. Yes, it was not the greatest technique. But also, yes, once again a player is lost to a game for something he could barely avoid and clearly did not set out to do.

Watching Michael Leitch’s red card on Saturday, the pertinent part is the contact before Leitch’s tackle, between Sootala Fa’aso’o and the Japanese hooker. Before that, Leitch had been standing as if to try and make a tackle with his inside shoulder; the connection of Fa’aso’o with the hooker knocked the ball-carrier straight towards a head-on clash with Leitch.

Leitch did not charge into the tackle. He did not have dominant force in the contact. He simply turned away and adopted a self-protective stance. Had he gone into the tackle, he would quite probably have ended up with his head on the wrong side and at risk of an ugly collision himself.

We seem not to be learning on this. Tacklers are already at a disadvantage, usually barely advancing while dozens of muscular kilos of rampaging ball-carrier accelerate towards them with shoulders lowered and bodies braced for the bosh.

Then we compound that disadvantage by red-carding them for self-preserving actions when the dynamics of the contact situation put them in danger: the big irony being that were they not to put themselves at risk of expulsion they’d probably be at risk of worse injury than the one they supposedly put the ball-carrier at risk of.

There are tackles that are high and dangerous and cheap, and contact moments which simply happen during rugby, about which little can be done. Our officials and World Rugby need to get a lot better at telling the difference, at the moment we are still seeing red cards for the latter as well as the former.

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