This week we will be mostly concerning ourselves with Mike Brown, Thierry Dusautoir, sportsmanship and the rules on residency.
Resident evil
Here’s a poser for you: where do you stand on Kilted Kiwis and their ilk?
World Rugby takes the bull by the horns this week with a vote on extending the residential qualification period for Test players from the current three years to five.
Passionately backed by the irrepressable Agustín Pichot, now vice-president of World Rugby, it looks like the extension will be ratified.
Scotland certainly seem to think so: they are getting in under the wire by calling three-year dibs on Oli Kebble, the young Stormers prop – a Baby Bok and a son of a Bok – who is not due to turn out for Glasgow Warriors until August.
You might perceive this tendered example as a little dig at Scotland’s expense, and you’d be right: Loose Pass would love to see all Test players bleed the same colour as their jerseys.
Does that make us romantic? Nationalistic? Your call, really. But we’d ‘fess up merely too unrealistic. Slightly deluded, even.
At the risk of turning the debate into some sort of oval-balled Brexit spite-storm, the rational part of our brain is telling us that no good can come from imposing further restrictions on trade and the free movement of labour.
Just look at it backwards. You are no longer the guy sat in the big stadium lamenting the second-language rendition of your anthem. You are the young boy in Fiji, dreaming of a better life for you and your family.
Love of country is all well and good, but if you’ve only ten years to make your fortune, you’d surely be a fool not to follow the money.
In a perfect world, all national unions would be able to make financial promises that their best and brightest could not refuse. To its credit, World Rugby is making decent strides in that direction, but we’re not there yet.
Moving the juicy carrot of Test rugby a couple of years down the track will not promote home-grown talent, it will merely provoke wealthy unions to seek out even younger imports. The Kebbles of tomorrow will be plucked out of school rather than from Super Rugby franchises.
That can’t be right.
Give a little respect
A press release passed across our desk a couple of months ago. It concerned junior rugby in the UK and centred on the introduction of a weighted scoring system, with the potential to dock points if teams or their supporters failed to respect officials.
Loose Pass paid it little heed, dismissing it is as much ado about nothing. After all, who else would be watching junior rugby (that’s U13 level and younger) besides parents, and what kind of parent would rip a strip off their kid’s referee? This is rugby, not soccer!
We wrapped that warm maxim around ourselves like a blanket and moved on, convinced in our belief that we had been presented with a solution that lacked a problem. As coach and ref and general dogsbody for his local U7s side, this correspondent believed himself to be in the perfect position to judge.
But then festival season began.
The first signs of disquiet peculated through overblown celebrations for even the simplest of tries – and there’s really no other flavour at U7 level. That’s not contrary to the spirit of the game, of course, but it is if the same parents react to the other team’s efforts with stony silence and grumbling.
And then came the unsolicited touch-judges – Starbucks coffees for flags – all making appeals in favour of their own child’s side, even when it was abundantly clear no-one had put a foot wrong.
And then the nadir: a coach demanding an explanation for my failure to spot a series knock-ons, and attempting to stop the game until I had furnished him with it.
The laws stipulate that play can continue from knock-ons at U7 level on account of the fact that they are still learning to catch, but somehow that explanation failed to pacify him: “What, even blatant knock-ons go unpunished?!”
We’re not picking on the guy and we’re not going to report him. We won’t even name and shame his club. He’s stepped up to volunteer his services, and that should be commended. But by involving himself in rugby, he has become its guardian. His duty is to project the game’s spirit and to ensure that his young charges embrace the true meaning of our sport.
As Ben Youngs’ withdrawal from the British and Irish Lions reminds us, rugby isn’t the be all and end all. Let’s always strive to keep it in perspective.
Generation snowflake
Oh, Mike Brown! What have you done?
The England man has all but ended his chances of a late Lions call-up by questioning Warren Gatland’s management style.
In an interview with The Rugby Paper, the Quin said he was “gutted” to have missed the cut and “disappointed to have had no feedback about being on standby”.
To Brown’s credit he was merely expressing his continued hunger for the game. You want that in a player. And contrary to what some of the headline writers thought, he didn’t come across as ‘furious’ and his comments hardly constituted a ‘slam’ or a ‘slate’ or a ‘swipe’.
But the feeling that he was entitled to some sort of ‘it’s not you it’s me’ call from Gatland does come across as slightly snowflake.
The story makes one pine for the days when men were made of sterner stuff. Our favourite tale of termination comes from mid ’90s and involves Bath legend Nigel Redman and Geoff Cooke, who embodied passive-aggression before it was even a thing.
Summoned to the England boss’s office in Twickenham after a shaky couple of Tests, Redman knew something was up. Much to his bemusement, he was handed a die.
“Roll a one to five and you’re dropped from the team,” said Cooke.
Redman, not just a pretty face, replied: “What if I roll a six?” The response? “You get another throw.”
You can’t argue with that.
Merci, Titi
Alas, it’s almost time to bid a very fond farewell to Thierry Dusautoir.
The French legend played a final, tearful game for Toulouse at the weekend, and will make his full bow for the Barbarians having been named in the squad to face England at Twickenham on May 28 and Ulster in Belfast on June 1.
So potentially two more games, which – in Dusautoir money – is about 463 tackles. (We joke, of course, but not much.)
‘Titi’ revolutionised the tackle area having come to rugby from judo at the age of 16, and the game’s evolution from donuts to dynamism owes a massive debt of gratitude to the man who captained France a record 56 times and won three Top 14 titles and a European crown with Toulouse.
In terms of great loose forwards, we’d put him right up there – even ahead of you-know-who in terms of sheer athleticism and natural ability.
And like Richie McCaw, Dusautoir’s leadership spilled out far beyond the whitewash.
In 2015, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, Dusautoir drew on his own heritage and the fundamental decencies of our game in an attempt to make some sense of the modern world.
“Je ne suis qu’un joueur de rugby,” he wrote.
Just a rugby player? Not true, Titi. You are a pillar of our sport and its wider community. Please stay exactly where you are!
Loose Pass was compiled by former Planet Rugby editor Andy Jackson
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