Getting away with it

Hero one day, villain the next.

Young Schalk Burger has just learnt a valuable lesson about the intrinsic injustice that exists in the game he has chosen to make his job.

In spite of the player, correctly to my mind, being let off after incurring that red card in Western Province’s match against the Lions at Newlands the dust has not yet settled on this one.

Thanks to the thoughtless words of a provincial president who clearly has little empathy with the players themselves and an understandably angry father whose own playing career was not without blemish, Burger’s joust with rugby law will bubble under for a while – it may even result in the young player leaving Western Province.

The debate has centred on whether the two yellow cards, amounting to a red, he incurred were correctly issued by referee Andre Watson rather than focusing on the greater problem of too much leeway in the way the laws are applied.

Burger is, in fact, a victim of this malady because he was only doing what he is supposed to do – trying to get away with as much as possible rather than concentrating on playing within the structure of the laws.

Rugby’s officials are to blame when a player like Burger gets into trouble because they have stood by and encouraged an atmosphere in which referees apply the laws subjectively, or sometimes not at all, in the interests of continuity.

Thus players such as Burger, especially foraging flankers such as Burger, go out to push the envelope; to play on the edge and to keep doing it to see what liberties the referee of the day allows them. They are coached and encouraged to do this and sadly, when the law does come down on them, they take the flak rather than the administrators who have allowed a situation to develop in which play is often not governed by what is written in the law book.

There are any number of instances one could cite but the most obvious is the case of hands in the ruck where not a Saturday, not a match, goes by in which certain players (especially of the attacking team) can reach down and play the ball with the hand while others are penalised for the same offence.

A cynical attitude has developed in which players deliberately and with the backing of their coaches ignore the laws – they will argue that they have to because others do it – and we have a situation in which the game is not governed by the laws as they are written in the book and therefore vulnerable to the foibles of all too human referees.

One of the best examples of this was the way England, on their way to winning the World Cup, were prepared to challenge the resolve of match officials at every turn, especially on defence, to either resort to a string of penalties or let things go.

This, in fact, was clever exploitation of the situation because the referees, just like the players, cannot rely on the support of officials when controversy erupts and are more keen to keep games moving rather than establishing the inviolability of the game’s rules – laying down the law if you will.

Referees, in fact, are often in more trouble for being punctilious – even though they have right on their side – and the upshot is that we now have a game in which too many match situations are open to subjectivity and interpretation and in which the “outlaws” are often hailed as the heroes.