Loose Pass: The Franco Mostert red card verdict and why there is an ‘imbalance’ in the Nations Championship
Springboks lock Franco Mostert was red carded on Saturday.
This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with cards of all hues and the actors in the spotlight after a fascinating weekend…
The rash grows
It ought to be said at the outset: not all of them were wrong. But the number of games featuring teams in the top 12 of the men’s rankings this weekend past was seven. The number of cards? 18.
This is clearly far too many to be fun, yet it could have been more had it not been for the occasional flicker of empathy from both Karl Dickson and Andrew Brace. But while rugby grapples with the twin threats of other sports growing in popularity and head contact fears, this is what we are left with.
It’s not making anyone happy. South African fans were already unhappy at the Lood de Jager incident last week; the Franco Mostert red card this weekend sent the green masses briefly into a deep conspiracy-theory rabbit-hole. But while last week’s decision was debatable at worst, the Mostert call brought together large swathes of rugby public in condemnation. Eddie Jones called it, the cards issued to three Japanese players and the red to Wales wing Josh Adams ‘farcical’ and ‘absurd’. And at times it did feel absurd, as though we were looking through replays for excuses to send people to the bin rather than looking to stamp out dirty play. The yellow card given to Codie Taylor was a bizarrely draconian intervention which felt very out of kilter with what was an excellent and clean game.
Interestingly, the instruction to replay the incident at full speed was what made the Mostert decision so perplexing. It is often said how the slow-motion replay can make things look so much worse, but it is also often that which manages to sort out the points of contact and levels of danger.
Eddie Jones sledges skint Welsh Rugby and calls on World Rugby to act on ‘absurd’ red cards
The slow-motion replay of Mostert’s tackle in isolation did not look great – but already critical in Loose Pass’s opinion is that, unlike De Jager, Mostert was not charging into the contact. He was stooped as much as a big man can be and his arms were spread wide. He was tackle-ready.
But when the replay was made at full speed, it brought home in great clarity just how quickly Mostert needed to not only react to his onrushing opponent, but also multiple other aspects. Ethan Hooker’s dynamic entry from the side. Paolo Garbisi popping the ball inside just before the contact, which had Mostert momentarily following the ball. It all takes fractions of a second to happen, even smaller fractions for Mostert to be able to react in the way the lawmakers would want him to. In the end, the whole Hooker/Garbisi bundle just ploughed into Mostert who, with the ball already gone, was not entirely focussed on bringing Garbisi down.
We did not ask impossible things of De Jager; nor, for that matter, of Adams, whose clearout, although ultimately inconsequential, was precisely the sort of act that the game’s administrators want gone for good. Focus on the process and not the outcome and Adams’ acts warranted disciplining. Asking 100-130kg players not to charge into others shoulder-first is not unreasonable. Sending them from the field for bracing for impacts as 100-odd kg of highly-trained muscle moves at top speed towards you is. We are asking too much of our tacklers and ruckers at times and the understanding continues to go missing too often.
Nations Championship still feels like too much
Monday morning’s inboxes glowed with promotional vox pops and self-satisfied soundbites surrounding the new Nations Championship, which kicks off with South Africa against England next July. A piece of scheduling which at least shows that the organisers can listen; after the way this November has run, is there another international fixture everybody wants to see more at the moment?
And it is a tournament with a better degree of integrity within its competitive design than some of the awkward shoe-horned stuff doing the rounds at the minute. Everybody does play everybody in the other hemisphere (the big, big win would be having Fiji and Japan integrated into the Rugby Championship as well, so that really everybody played everybody, full stop).
You’d forgive England, Wales and Scotland for feeling they’d got a bum deal in schlepping across 12 time zones to play Fiji, Argentina and South Africa away, while Ireland, Italy and France have a relatively meagre four time zones to cope with for their matches against Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Granted, Fiji will likely play somewhere more travel-friendly, but there’s still an imbalance there.
The whole thing still feels like over-milking a cash cow, however. The Six Nations all now have 12 matches at full competitive intensity scheduled for the year, the SANZAAR Nations perhaps even one or two more. Allowing for some eight weeks of well-earned RnR/pre-season as well, clubs now have only 30 weeks to slot in a full domestic and European programme around it all. Does that work or will the club game continue to dwindle? Will nations really be at full strength? How can we trust that club v country debates will not be stirred up by the competing schedules and priorities? And do we all have the money, time and resource to keep filling stadia and travelling to follow our teams? How long before it all becomes stale and tired and we find ourselves re-inventing it all again because the revenues didn’t hit forecasts?
The tournament has an unmistakeable freshness to it, a bringing-together of a previously fractured landscape. It looks as though it could be fun. But there are many devils in the detail that still lurk.
