Cutting down those tall poppies

The chirps from the fans at Lansdowne Road tend to be cleverer and funnier than they are elsewhere. There was one during the second half at the weekend which, although unintentional, was also laden with irony.

It was about 25 minutes into the second half. Referee Paul Honiss was consulting his touch-judges and looked for all the world like he was about to flash another yellow card at someone. As chance would have it, as the officials conferred, it was also time for Schalk Burger to come back onto the field after serving his 10 minute suspension for slowing the ball down in a tackle.

As the South African flank made his way onto the field Honiss and the touch-judges were still talking, so Burger stood behind them just out of the circle. The Ireland fans were calling for another flag, and the wags behind me in the press box immediately began a chorus of “There he is ref, it’s No.6, it’s No6, send him off again.”

They were just coddling, as the Irish would say, but in many ways the reaction of this section of the crowd might have been an accurate commentary of why Burger always seems to be the man who attracts the yellow card.

Big, rugged with long blonde locks, Burger is easy to spot. He stands out. And, because he has now picked up a succession of yellow cards, he has become a marked man, not just by referees but also by those in the opposition crowd who know his reputation and his value to the team.

They say that when you give a dog a bad name he ends up keeping it, and it has to be said that this is to some extent now proving true with Burger.

When a ball is slowed down, or there is some other infraction at the breakdown which the referee finds difficult to decipher, it has become all too easy for them to use the usual scapegoat as an example to the rest of the players.

Now I am not for a moment suggesting that Burger is squeaky clean, for clearly he is not. Corne Krige, when still captaining a Stormers team that had Burger in it earlier in the year, told me before the end of the Super 12 that while he rated Burger extremely highly, there were aspects of his game that worried him.

And those aspects were all the technical aspects which are now being preyed on by referees and which are making the 14-man syndrome an almost perennial one for the Boks. Krige told me that Burger would be penalized too often and would give away yellow cards once the referees cottoned onto some deficiencies in his approach.

But these are not necessarily fatal flaws in Burger’s game, and in time he will come right. What we do know is that he is a wonderfully talented player, and that he is far too valuable to the Springbok cause to be just summarily thrown away.

That is why White is correct in not doing as he promised by throwing the book at Burger now that he has picked up yet another card. And he is also right when he says that there is such a fine line at breakdown time that it is hard to treat the phase as an empirical science, which would mean you could always make a definite call as to whether a player was really guilty or not.

We know that much because so often we do see referees getting it wrong there, or at least we perceive them to be getting it wrong, which is more the point. Perception is what it is all about.

What worries me now though is that even in our own country we might be seeing evidence of the Tall Poppy Syndrome coming to the fore (when a poppy gets too tall, cut it down and never let it grow too big).

It is a strange thing about humans: When a player, no matter what the sport, is on the way up, everyone considers him promising and is on his side. When he establishes himself, however, often the mood swings.

We liked John McEnroe before winning Wimbledon started to become a habit, ditto for Bruce Fordyce at the Comrades. Those examples are not nearly as good though as Michael Schumacer.

I am not lumping Burger in with the sort of invincibility described above, but I think most readers will know what I mean. He has established himself now to the extent that he is one of the favourites for the World Player of the Year Award. Sadly, that appears to have made him fair game for some people who don’t want life to be too easy for those who have made it.

It was maybe summed up by the player ratings handed out by the Irish version of The Sunday Times after Saturday’s game. Burger got one of the poorest ratings, five out of 10. Now this was some way from being short of his best performance, but if you look how present he was in virtually every photograph after the game, and how well he did to get back and make the tackle that eventually led to his carding, he did still have more influence than a 50% mark merits.

Hopefully I am wrong, and this is not a part of the problem now confronting Burger, but I do believe that now he has picked up a couple of yellow cards in succession there are going to be those who will maliciously hope that every time the referee in future reaches into his pocket it will have Burger’s name on it.

That would be sad because here we have a truly awesome player.