You reap what you sow

There are many myths in rugby union, but one of the biggest of them all is that it was William Webb Ellis who invented the sport.

Imagine for a moment that Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it – and no-one tackled him. What would he have been had the rest of the players in the soccer match just shrugged their shoulders, called for a new ball and let him run away with the one he had stolen? He would have amounted to at best a nondescript reprobate who didn’t play to the laws, and at worst a ball thief.

The first player who tackled him was actually the person who invented rugby. It was that act that gave rise to a new sport, which has never been about just running with the ball, but finding a way to break down the defensive system of the team of tacklers.

The suggestion that Usain Bolt would be a dynamite wing reckons without the obvious caveat that he would have to run through tacklers, and not around them. It is becoming a rare thing for wings to just use their pace to go around opponents into space. Repeatedly spectators get excited because they see what looks like an overlap developing, only for the cover to be across to force the play back inside.

The recent Bledisloe Cup match in Sydney was interesting because both coaches had taken the opportunity beforehand to criticise the Springbok approach. Both All Black coach Graham Henry and his Wallaby counterpart Robbie Deans decried the dominance of the kicking game in modern test rugby.

I am not sure they really have such a big view on it, however, as when they were in South Africa recently they said it was fair play to the Boks if they could win by playing to their strengths.

What they were really doing was playing to the media outcry in Australasia over the Springbok ability to dominate opposing teams with a mixture of strong, physical forward play and excellent kicking.

It is quite clear the Australians and New Zealanders are going to struggle to beat the Boks now that they have gone back to playing to their core strengths, and their best hope is that John Smit’s team will self-destruct by bowing to the pressure. It isn’t any fun seeing your team getting shut out, and as we saw in 2008, opposition teams have a much better chance of winning when the Boks depart from the usual script.

In that sense, part of me says the Aussie and Kiwi bleating probably conforms to the same mentality that inspired a drive to put limits on short-pitched bowling when the West Indies, with their quartet of awe-inspiring quick bowlers, were in their pomp and dominating world cricket in the 1970s and 1980s.

But there is another angle to it, and we must accept that rugby in Australia faces different challenges to what it faces in South Africa. Here the most important thing is that the Springboks must win, but in Australia the sport is competing against other codes.

The Boks are not the first team this year to be attacked by the Australian media for “winning ugly”. It was a charge laid against the Waratahs by the Sydney media even at a stage when the Waratahs were leading the Super 14. It prompted an adjustment to the Waratahs approach that saw them fall out of championship contention.

The drive to sell the sport for its entertainment value explains the at times quite mystifying statements by the Aussie commentators during the Sydney match. They seemed to think the rugby was a step-up in terms of product, but I did not see it.

In Sydney, like in the South African games, the pressure applied by the attacking teams was translated into points not through tries, but through penalty kicks. There was only one try in the match, and if the game missed something, it was the physical edge brought by the Boks.

There were periods in the game where the All Blacks and Wallabies threw a lot of effort into ball in hand rugby, but where did it get them? We waited until the 65th minute for the only try, and a supposedly great attacking team like New Zealand only scored once in a game where they dominated both possession and territory to a quite ridiculous degree.

This tells us that defensive systems are dominating, a trend that started when league ideas that arguably have done nothing to enhance the aesthetic appeal of the sport, started to be imported into rugby union. And guess which country was in the forefront of turning rugby into a cross-pollination of union and league. Yep, it was Australia.