Most of the major teams at the Rugby World Cup except the Aussies and Scots have played a game as I write this. There has been a lot of fine rugby and some astonishing passages of play; but some of the actions were not set pieces.
TMO Madness
Some early games of the 2015 Rugby World Cup [RWC] have been spoiled by the TMO being over-used.
It started from the first game between England and Fiji when referee Jaco Peyper and TMO Shaun Veldsman seemed to conspire to drag the game out.
One sequence was right out of Monty Python.
Fiji scrummie Matawalu burst away in the first half to score in the corner, apparently, but JP and SV wanted to review something before the try. It was deemed OK and the try was given, but while the conversion was being prepared Peyper looked up at a replay which he didn’t ask for, but was provided for the crowd.
The conversion was almost ready to go but Peyper nearly crapped in his shorts when he looked up at the screen and saw that Matawalu had dropped the pill !!
Jaco Peyper looks at the screen
No try; scrum England. One wondered if that crowd replay would have been provided if England had spilt the ball.
But wait there’s more. Fiji got the pill from the England scrum and it was cross-kicked it to big bopper winger Nadolo to score after an aerial contest. Or did he? – the dynamic duo, JP and SV, took minutes to review something that would have taken Blind Freddie only seconds to give the thumbs up to.
Then there were the interminable replays for the final try of the game. Fortunately I was able to fast-forward my recording but watching it live must have been the pits.
It was a horrible use of the TMO technology.
The malignant maul
This engine of legal obstruction, more suited to the NFL than Rugby Union is not everybody’s cup of tea, but it gives the fatties something to do.
There are a few laws about it and one is:
17.4 (f) – When players of the team who are not in possession of the ball in the maul voluntarily leave the maul such that there are no players of that team left in the maul, the maul may continue … etc etc
Sounds good – you don’t want defenders wimping out of a contest they have entered into, do you?
But – hold the phone – what about “voluntary”? That means you did something deliberately, right? So how did England score their first try against Fiji?
Maul “try” – watch from 2 min 30 secs to 3 mins – courtesy of World Rugby
They put on a lineout drive and their maul sheared off slightly to the right leaving behind some Fijians who had to run back. The maul met defenders with the ball still at the back, and sheared off again without Fijians in it, and again it contacted defenders.
The Fijians didn’t leave the maul voluntarily; the maul left them voluntarily; the maul should have terminated—so; penalty Fiji for obstruction by England when the Fijians were contacted—right ??
Wrong. Play continued and when Matawalu infringed Peyper awarded a penalty try and gave the Fijian 9 a yellow card into the bargain.
The one time that Peyper should have invoked a replay, and Veldsman chirped in his ear – they were silent.
Eddie Jones and the Brave Blossoms
Ex-Wallaby, Reds and Brumbies coach, Eddie Jones, has had a successful stint for Japan.
Eddie was a schoolboy friend and team mate of the Ella brothers at Matraville High School and later at Randwick and NSW. He went to Japan and elsewhere after he finished in Australia.
With a Japanese mother and a Japanese wife, he was fluent with the language and understood the culture—and he had coached in Japan for various teams previously.
When he became the Head Coach of Japan he dumped some overseas players and played more of the local lads, but the team wasn’t as successful as he hoped.
Eddie didn’t take too many prisoners after Japan lost to the French Barbarians in 2012 and his spray at the press conference is now legendary.
Watch this video until about 3 mins 18secs and again from 5 mins 55 secs
Maybe the spray worked because things got better and Japan had a winning streak of eleven games in twelve months starting in November 2013.
A few days ago his Brave Blossoms caused a huge upset at Brighton by beating the Springboks.
The Boks lost all three games in the 2015 Rugby Championship, and in doing so went down to Argentina 25-37 in Durban; so there were signs that some team could upset them in the RWC, but nobody expected that Japan would cause it.
The tired-looking Springboks were out-hustled by the Japanese whose starting pack weighed in 56 kgs lighter that the huge South Africans. The Boks didn’t help themselves by going for a bonus-point win—they turned down chances for penalty goals and left points on the park.
Instead of controlling the game they tried to mix it with the Japanese who were fizzing around and making chop-tackles; the Boks fell like totem poles.
In the end it came down to decisions by Japan captain Michael Leitch. With the score 29-32 he twice spurned attempts to kick a penalty goal to tie the match at the death, but he went for the win.
And the rest is history.
Eddie was happier after the Springbok game:
Video courtesy of World Rugby
The commentators
There is a mixed bag of them at the RWC.
Countries can supply their own commentary. Fox Sports has their own callers for the Aussie games and any other big game they care to cover I imagine, and in the UK and Ireland there are different commentary teams even for the same game.
There is also a world feed that covers English commentary for all the matches. Thus on Fox Sports we had Gordon Bray and Joel Stransky for the Boks v Japan, and Miles Harrison and Andy Gommersall for France v Italy.
Alan Quinlan formerly of Munster and Ireland has been good value co-commentating on the Ireland and Wales match world feeds. Quinny has no love of officialdom having missed a Lions’ tour for alleged eye-gouging, and has has panned the RWC referees for being over-officious and paying scant regard to the materiality of some events that are sanctioned.
Joel Stransky has been good value as a commentator
He had a point, and Chris Patterson of Scotland, co-commentator with Bray in the Samoa v USA match, was not happy either. He gave referee George Clancy several serves for whistling up immaterial infringements.
It was strange to hear Harrison commentate without his old mucker Stuart Barnes, and Tony Johnson (with Stransky) doing the world feed, and not the Kiwi one, for New Zealand v Argentina, but there are strange bedfellows at Rugby World Cups.
Amiable Nick Mullins, commentator for ITV, made the gaffe of the week—for political incorrectness. At an exciting moment during Fiji v England he reportedly said:
“They will be back in Fiji around one television hoping the generator doesn’t fail them.”
I like Stransky who doesn’t moan and make excuses when the South Africans play badly. He was gracious after the Japan victory, and when Bray said that it was the biggest upset in RWC history, he replied that it was the biggest upset in the history of all sport.
I don’t know about that, but the best comment of the week was from John Inverdale of ITV. When mentioning the sin-binning of Richie McCaw and Conrad Smith within a few minutes at Twickenham he reportedly said:
“That’s the most capped sin bin of all time.”
He hasn’t always been silver-tongued. Recently he was interviewing a female jockey at Cheltenham, about her early career, when he said: ‘This is looking at it with rose-c****ed — er, rose-tinted glasses — from the past … “
What a pr***.
Audio of the Inverdale C-bomb
