When the searing pace of Mark Wood was belatedly introduced to the England attack on the fourth day of the final test of an enthralling Ashes series, it made an immediate impact. Suddenly the Australian opener Usman Khawaja was hurried, and a bouncer thudded into his head, or more particularly helmet, which meant a lengthy delay as concussion protocols were satisfied.
The care taken was necessary. Just as, a day earlier many thousands of kilometres away and in a different sport, the two long delays that stretched the first half of the Castle Lager Rugby Championship test between South Africa and Argentina were also justified. Concussion is a real problem and can have long lasting consequences.
What was different about the Khawaja incident at The Oval and that which saw Springbok scrumhalf Grant Williams taken from the field early in the Johannesburg game was that there wasn’t an outcry after the former. There wasn’t any call to sanction Wood, to give him a red card for doing something that is implicitly dangerous or it wouldn’t be described as an intimidatory tactic.
Bowling bouncers in cricket is still considered part of the game, and in the middle of the Ashes series it was the go too strategy for two captains trying to get some impact from pitches that were otherwise unhelpful to the bowlers. It didn’t matter to anyone involved that in the last Ashes series played in England, in 2019, a spiteful Jofra Archer bouncer put Australia’s gun player, Steve Smith, out of the next match.
Or for that matter that many Australians, and indeed cricket followers around the world, have not forgotten the tragic death of Phil Hughes back in 2014, a time when you’d have imagined there was most likely to be a clamour to have the bouncer outlawed.
Nope, the bouncer has been part of cricket since the year dot, and while bowlers often sympathise with batsmen that have been hit, like they are completely unaware that such a thing could result from the tactic, it has remained part of the game. For it is an indispensable part of particularly the longest and purest form of the game. Test and first class cricket would not be the same without it.
CRICKET DID WELL BUT RUGBY NOT SO MUCH
Cricket as a sport did well to not overreact to the Hughes tragedy. While it is understandable that there should be a drive to make rugby safer, I am not sure the sports rulers are responding correctly to World Rugby’s fear of legal action from people who surely knew the dangers of the sport they chose to play. Just like surely downhill mountain bikers, or indeed any kind of cyclist, understand the potential for serious injury in theirs.
That rugby has changed enormously in the last few decades can be understood from just one simple fact: When the late James Small was sent off for back-chatting referee Ed Morrison in Brisbane in 1993, he became the first Springbok in history to be sent from the field. That after more than 100 years of Bok tests, many of them brutally and spitefully contested.
My first proper exposure to international rugby was in watching the 1976 series between the Boks and All Blacks on television. In one game a Kiwi player had his ear just about removed from his head in a rucking incident. Another player nearly lost the sight in one eye after being punched, which was behind the title of the late Barry Glasspool’s book on that series: ‘One in the Eye’. And yet no one was sent off.
TELEVISION HAS CHANGED THE GAME
Of course, it may not be a coincidence that the series was the first to be shown on television in this country. Television only arrived properly in this country that year. The introduction of television would naturally have intensified the need to clean up the game and make it safer. That 1976 series would not have been a good advert for the game to mothers who had children thinking of taking up rugby.
And like a beetle that increases the size of his ball of dung as he rolls it, so as the years have passed has the game changed. To the point where we’ve reached today, where you have to ask whether the drive for safer rugby is not threatening to change the sport into something unrecognisable from its original form.
As my colleague Brenden Nel wrote in his match report after the Johannesburg game, according to the letter of the law, there should have been a red card for the Williams incident. The authorities appear to agree, because there will now be a disciplinary hearing.
My take though is that either the law is an ass or rugby should make the charge down illegal. It was an ugly incident, but there wasn’t malicious intent, to my eyes (note that qualification) it was nothing more than an attempted charge down. Brenden agreed there was no intent, and in conversation he also agreed with me that the incident wasn’t dissimilar to the one at Newlands in 2016 where Pat Lambie was concussed, one in which he felt CJ Stander was unfortunate to be red carded.
And that’s the thing that is of concern: There are far too many red cards in modern rugby where you could say the so-called perpetrator is unfortunate. Like Kwagga Smith was when his red card cost the Emirates Lions the chance of Super Rugby glory in the 2017 final. Continually we see clashes of heads that are pure accidents but the referee is expected to send someone off.
TOO MANY GAMES BEING RUINED BY CARDS
Too many games are being ruined for spectators who pay lots of money and travel long distances by incidents that are the result of clumsiness at worst. Because it was their own player that was hurt at Emirates Airlines Park, South Africans bayed for red, but put the boot on the other foot, like when Pieter-Steph du Toit was sent off in Marseille last November, and the same people make the opposite argument.
Where is it going to end? My own take is that World Rugby should protect itself from legal action by asking players to sign indemnity forms, as I was when I once foolishly signed up for a mountain bike race. Never again, my sense of self-preservation is way too acute for that! The way I understand it, the requirement for marathon runners to be licensed is also for indemnity purposes.
An alternative is to change the laws so that charge downs are illegal, players aren’t allowed to jump for the ball in the air, tackles can only aim at areas of the body where there is likely to be least physical damage. It can go on and on and on, until the set scrums and mauls too are banished from the game. In which case we aren’t even turning rugby union into rugby league, we are putting it on an inexorable path to becoming touch rugby.
A LAUGHABLE SUGGESTION BUT HOW ELSE DO YOU MAKE RUGBY SAFER
So let’s return to cricket. The short ball in that sport would be far more of an issue were it not for the seismic change ushered in during the Packer revolution in the late 1970s. The first time I saw a batsman wearing a helmet live I think it was Barry Richards when he returned to play a one-off game for Natal following one of the Packer series in Australia, but I think it was England batsman Dennis Amiss who first wore what in those days resembled a motorcycle helmet.
It was a talking point back then but now it is standardised equipment and you will see helmets being worn by batsmen even when facing innocuous spin. Given that the ball that thumped into Khawaja struck his helmet, and the blow was forceful enough to force a ball change, you wouldn’t want to imagine what state Khawaja would have been in had he not had head protection.
Turning rugby into gridiron by introducing helmets is obviously not the way to go or it would have been done years ago, but head protection for certain players has been de rigueur for years. In the 1980s and early 1990s Natal flyhalf Henry Coxwell, used as Ian McIntosh’s guinea pig for his direct rugby approach, wore a scrum cap so he could continue playing after a few concussions.
I am not sure if there is a head protection device that can answer the call, but given the number of clever people contributing to the debate from the medical side, surely there must be some bright spark out there that can come up with something that might be rugby’s answer to cricket’s helmet.
Yes, it is a laughable suggestion, and is made partly tongue in cheek, but how else is rugby going to answer the drive for the impossible goal of making it safe without fundamentally changing the sport?
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