Going to ground

John Plumtree is worried about what is rugby is coming to and I have news for him – the game has gone to ground.

The Sharks coach was understandably peeved, in spite of a win over his team’s old nemesis the Bulls that three of his players (Albert van der Berg, Jacques Botes and Skipper Badenhorst) were sin-binned during Friday night’s Currie Cup match at the Absa Stadium but I was surprised there weren’t more yellow cards.

The Sharks, for me, set the tenor of a match by simply ignoring the laws at the breakdown and challenging the referee, in this case Mark Lawrence, and his assistants to either make a farce of the contest or letting it go.

Later the Bulls started to do it to – making no effort to stay on their feet or not fall over the ball – and an exasperated Lawrence had his hands full trying to inject some continuity.

And hokaai Sharks fans, hold on awhile before you fire off those irate e-mails about my being against your team.

Far from it. I actually watched it all with grim satisfaction, because I had been proven right, and serious dissatisfaction, at what havoc is being foist on this game of ours, because as far back as the early rounds of the Super 14 I predicted that the way to combat the new laws which permit hands-in and the tackler to remain off-sides at a tackle was to simply ignore the rules.

So what the Sharks were doing was inevitable. The way to play now is that you get your breakaway or the first man there to get his hands on the ball and then to simply fall over to prevent it from being played – not occasionally to kill a dangerous situation but every time.

There was something similar going in the Test match with referee Alain Rolland forced to award nine penalties within the first 16 minutes to gain control. A weaker, less experienced referee might have ended up littering Vodacom Park in Bloemfontein with yellow cards.

The game is a mess and it was bound to happen once hands in was allowed. Backline players are bigger and stronger and have no fear to attack the ball on the ground – in fact they’re coached to – and the forwards get there so quickly that the only outcomes are a pile-up or the kind of violent clean-out which Bakkies Botha is unfairly in trouble for.

The law-makers have created the situation and seem loath to address and rectify the mess they have made. Something has to be done about the break-down and to me the way to go is back to rucking – get the ball on the ground, get the hands out and encourage players to drive over the ball to put it behind them rather than going down on it.

Funnily enough a host of former players I have spoken to agree with me; but what do we know?!

Remember the outcry when the reality of the experimental law variations first hit home? Well, we’ve been through the Lions tour and we’re now into the Tri-Nations and I haven’t a single plaintiff voice calling for a return to the ELVs. What does that tell you?