Confusion on cards makes messier, not safer

In both of rugby’s showpiece occasions, the best players in the world have been unable to abide by the laws.

New Zealand captain Sam Cane following defeat to South Africa in the rugby World Cup. Picture: AFP

Amid the shock and adrenaline surge of seeing Sam Cane being shown a red card on Saturday night, a lot of us rushed to the observation that this was the first time that a player had been sent off in a Rugby World Cup final. But of course that is not true, is it? Because Lydia Thompson, the England winger, was sent off in the women’s World Cup final, less than a year ago.

This is not to sound smart. It is to make the point that in both rugby’s showpiece occasions, the best players in the world have been unable to abide by the laws. No one intended to break them. I think it is fair to say that intent played no part in either Cane’s or Thompson’s error, it’s just that the rugby was too hard, too fast and furious, and too complicated. This is the game.

At some point, someone now says that players just need to improve their tackle technique, but if you turn the key variables - speed and power - up to the max, as you do in a World Cup final, what we see is that the best players in the world cannot sufficiently master tackling technique either.

Thus did the game experience its worst fear. The past eight weeks have been an exhibition of rugby at its most brutal and brilliant best. This tournament has stockpiled contenders for best-ever games. Saturday was a contender for the best final. But it has also stockpiled the game’s problems. It has been a window into the sheer impossibility of the game policing itself, and here we were at the final, the grandest stage of all, where it may have been the rugby police that won the game.

Cane was sent off in the 29th minute and New Zealand lost by one point. In the women’s World Cup final in November, Thompson was sent off in the 18th minute, and England lost by three. Decide for yourselves if you think that one player would have changed these results.

And so we go away from the big stage of the World Cup final debating what-ifs and what-might-have-beens, and Martin Johnson, England’s World Cup-winning captain, saying on the BBC that he would have sent neither player off and that “someone needs to explain to Sam Cane why he has left the field and Siya Kolisi has stayed on”.

Indeed, Kolisi, the South Africa captain, was handed a yellow, like Cane, only his did not turn to red. In their well-meaning attempt to give clarity to the policing of the high-tackle laws, the lawmakers have constructed a web of rights and wrongs so complex that offences that look the same can be separated. In real time, when you compare the two incidents, it was actually Kolisi who would have had more time to adjust his body position and avoid head contact, but other minutiae stood against Cane.

There are specialists who argue that the two decisions were correct, but it is a convoluted system that has declared that Cane should be the captain heaped with the shame of letting down his country and Kolisi should be the one who lifts the golden trophy.

Ian Foster, the All Blacks coach, got it pretty much spot on with his own restrained assessment of the situation when he said that “the game has got a few issues it has to sort out, and that’s not sour grapes. You’ve got two different situations with different variables and one is a red card, one is a yellow card. That is the game.”

Of course, rugby’s administrators have had to draw the line somewhere. If you have multimillion-dollar lawsuits hanging over you, all related to your ability to look after your players, then you must be seen to be taking positive action. That makes it sound like it is all just PR, and that would be unfair, yet the further the game goes to draw lines and make players safe, the more complicated the refereeing of it becomes.

If Cane’s was a straightforward red, then Wayne Barnes, the referee, would have been able to decide that for himself without having to refer it to the bunker. And then, if the evidence had been clear to the bunker, it would not have required almost the full ten minutes available to upgrade Cane’s penalty from yellow to red. The time required to arrive at this decision merely exemplifies how impossible it is for rugby to police itself.

I am eternally impressed by the extent of the understanding and patience to which rugby fans give this intricate game that they love. Saturday’s final could have turned in the last phases of the game when Kwagga Smith put his hand down on the ground before executing the crucial turnover; another referee might have given that against him. The exact same case came at the denouement of South Africa’s quarter-final against France: Smith, hand down, gets away with the turnover and South Africa win a game that another referee might have called against them.

Ditto Sam Whitelock’s last-minute turnover for the All Blacks against Ireland - tiny moments, open to two different interpretations, decide winners and losers. The grand imperfection of it all is largely embraced and forgiven.

Yet when it comes to protecting the head, rugby is not so much imperfect as impossible. I may be wrong here; I note that Ireland, in particular, rarely ever give away cards for high-tackle indiscipline. But it is also the case that concussion numbers are not going down in the professional game.

It is almost seven years since World Rugby altered protocols in an attempt to protect the head, but how effective was that new deterrent when we have just had red cards in the past two biggest games on the planet?

I used to be a fervent supporter of World Rugby’s campaign - I assumed that raising the penalties for high tackles would change players’ behaviour. Seven years on, any such certainty has evaporated.

What has also changed in the seven years is the advance of neuroscientists’ understanding of the link between concussions and long-term brain damage. Scientific evidence is showing us that it is not so much the occasional big head-banging blow, such as Cane’s, that causes the damage, but the accumulation of frequent sub-concussive impacts. And while there is rugby, that is impossible to stop.

Yet, because it has to do something, the game has created the labyrinthine system that culminated on the big Stade de France stage. Win or lose, leading his team out in the World Cup final should have been the apogee of Cane’s career, yet he finished the villain of the piece - and all for a set of laws that may not actually be saving the game after all.

It is the expectation with this kind of journalism for the author to offer some solutions, but my fear is that rugby is reaching the stage where solutions do not exist. I hope I am wrong.

I support the idea of the “orange” card, whereby Cane would have got 20 minutes off the pitch rather than 52. And I am intrigued by the brave new world; it is highly possible that, when we return for the next World Cup, tackle height may have caught up with the amateur game and been reduced to the sternum.

But that is the future. For now, it is a credit to the players who stayed on the pitch that they served up a final of such flabbergasting tension. They managed to show how great such a flawed game can be. Rugby works brilliantly and yet it also struggles to work at all.

THE TIMES