SPIRO: England begin World Cup with a bonus point whimper

To make a slight change to an old adage: a bonus point win is a bonus point win. But, overall, England have begun their 2015 Rugby World Cup campaign not with a bang but a whimper.

Of course, England will be pleased with their 35-11 victory over Fiji. The alternative to a win (which many were predicting before the match) would have effectively put England out of the finals. And despite their error-tainted, nervy play, England managed, with two late tries, to secure a crucial bonus point.

In the pool of death, with the Wallabies and Wales contesting with England a finals position, this bonus point could be crucial in solving the equation of three into two doesn’t go.

On this display, Fiji have no hope of going through to the finals. Coach John McKee and his assistant the former Bulls coach Frans Ludeke have improved Fiji’s set piece. But the exuberance and flair of running with the ball from unexpected situations has gone from Fiji’s game.

Fiji kicked away most of the ball won by the forwards, most of the match. The occasional times they ran, they actually put pressure on England’s defensive lines.

But Fiji are never going to win big matches at World Cup tournaments by playing like England. Having failed in their first-up match, Fiji need to be allowed to be freed to play in the Fijian manner. It will be interesting to see if they are able to make this change – a needed reversion to type – when they play the Wallabies on Friday morning (EST).

England can thank the gods of rugby that Mike Brown has made a successful return from a concussion. He ran for about 149 metres in the match that had little running in it, from 12 carries. He scored a hard-shouldered try towards the end of the match (one of two) which sealed the victory and opened up the possibility of a four-try bonus point.

But aside from Brown, England were lacklustre, leaden-footed and dull-minded in the backs.

The England forwards were occasionally beaten in the scrums (and just as occasionally monstered Fiji in the scrums, too), were held in the lineouts and generally looked to lack the sort of speed and aggression that would frighten, say, a fired-up Wallabies pack.

England’s work at the breakdown was unimpressive, to put the matter politely. Fiji were far more combative and successful in forcing turnovers. This points to a serious weakness in England’s pack with Chris Robshaw, a natural No.6, playing at No.7.

England’s No.6 Tom Wood, though, was England’s best forward. Aside from him, England’s forwards were slow and will surely be found out by, say, a David Pocock-Michael Hooper combination.

Crucially, though, England won the battle for possession, 59 per cent to 41 per cent. This meant that when the multitude of mistakes were made by backs and forwards, England were generally in Fiji’s territory, or closer to their own halfway mark than their own try line.

This was important because it meant that Fiji’s penalty attempts were generally from long distance. Nemani Nadolo and Ben Volavola kicked a penalty each. But they missed enough kicks at goal, a conversion and any number of penalty shots that could have won the match for their side if they had been successful.

The England backs stood too deep. They shovelled the ball along the line with the lack of enthusiasm of a someone passing on a boarding house meal down to someone further down the table. There was too much kicking. And too little direct attacking running.

The exceptions were Brown and Sam Burgess who came on for a 20-minute cameo and managed to straighten the line of attack by taking the ball to the line and getting away off-loads that enabled the attack to be continued.

England’s coach Stuart Lancaster now has a major selection decision to make. Does he gamble on starting with Sam Burgess?

Before the Rugby World Cup started, the former Scotland ferocious flanker John Jeffrey and now head of World Rugby’s rugby committee issued a series of warnings for referees and players about what will be expected from them in terms of behaviour on the field and adherence to the laws.

Referees were told to stop players from appealing to referees for penalties by waving their hands and shouting out.

Early on in the England-Fiji match, referee Jaco Peyper told Fiji’s halfback Nikola Matawalu to stop trying to referee the play. Good. This waving of hands and pointing into the rucks and mauls is frustrating for the spectators. No penalty was awarded. However, when Dan Cole refused to back away from arguing with Peyper about a scrum decision (which was correctly against England), Peyper heard him out. He should have told him to wrack off.

Referees also were told to watch crooked feeds: police the rear feet offside line, stop endless scrum collapses, keep players on their feet in the rucks, and stop diving.

By and large, Peyper did this. Good. But he has received criticism for his handling of the match, which was stop-start and penalty-riddled.

This is unfair, in my opinion. The real culprit in creating a slow-paced game that was marred with interminable replays of tries, non-tries and illegal play was the TMO, the South African Shaun Veldsman.

Veldsman is a classic case of a an official who interferes with the flow of a game because he can. He showed his colours as an officious TMO some years ago when he broke the rules at the time and instructed referee George Clancy that a pass to All Black Israel Dagg was forward and that a try he awarded should be reversed.

As I say, that intervention was a wrong ruling, even though the pass was actually forward. But Veldsman has gone on since then to establish himself as the leading TMO in world rugby and an official who now seems to have more influence on the outcome of a match than the referee.

It is always wrong when an official becomes the decisive factor in a match. It is even worse when that official is not even on the field but is surrounded somewhere in the stands with modern technology that allows him to scrutinise virtually every play, on and off the ball, in a match.

The definition of an officious and essentially obnoxious official is that he is someone who is given an inch and becomes a ruler. This is Veldsman.

The opportunity to become the ruler of the opening match of the 2015 Rugby World Cup offered by this technology to Veldsman just went to his head. It seemed that most of the match was spent with Veldsman asking Peyper to have one more look, after a multitude of different angles had been shown.

The last try of the match, for instance, took about three minutes to decide as shot after shot was shown, from every angle and every speed. This is a sort of torturing the data that ends up torturing the viewers.

The match itself ran over-time by some 20 minutes, most of them spent by Veldsman going through his array of video replays.

The Rugby World Cup committee needs to have an urgent talk with Veldsman and the other TMOs (Australian George Ayoud is another version of the Veldsman model) to be thorough but quick.

They need to support the initiative, too, of Nigel Owens who was clearly annoyed with a trivial intervention by George Ayoub in the Tonga – Georgia match. Ayoub stopped play to show Owens a Tongan supposedly tackling a Georgian around the head.

Owens was not impressed. He asked Ayoud quizzically when the shots showed a Tongan arm in contact more with the shoulder: “Are you sure it was around the head?”

Ayoub assured Owens that it was. He didn’t take the hint to back off. Rather he insisted on showing the shots again. Owens told him that he needed to see some “twisting” of the head, which he couldn’t see.

Hopefully, Ayoud and Veldsman will take notice of the reaction their unnecessary intrusions have provoked. Better still, they should be warned that any more shockers from them will find them dropped, just as players who have shockers are dropped.

One other point. Owens kept on explaining his decisions on the run when there may have been an Ayoud intervention. This seems to be good practice to me and something the other referees might consider adopting too.

The point has been made to me that when technologies like these slow-motion replays are introduced, the players involved are given a small amount of time, 10 seconds in cricket, to decide whether to lodge their appeal.

Why aren’t the Rugby World Cup TMO officials put under a similar time restraint, say 30 seconds? This would allow for a number of replays. Once 30 seconds are up, a decision needs to be made.

Once the replay of the Fijian halfback Matawatu’s brilliant solo ‘try’ was shown, for instance, it was obvious he had dropped the ball. Why were endless shots of the replay shown? Why was there even a replay of Nadolo’s terrific and clear-cut leaping try?

You got the impression from all the endless replays, the assessing of a lifting tackle on Jonny May that saw Dominiko Waqaniburotu given a yellow card, for instance, that Veldsman was revelling in the limelight of showing off all the technological tricks at his disposal.

Memo to Veldsman: the less we see and hear from you, the better. If you have to intervene, do it within 30 seconds. Spectators at the game and people watching in a potential 772 million households around the world want to see the player doing their thing, not officials being officious

***

The Rugby Football Union (England’s pretentiously named rugby union) was the host of the 1991 Rugby World Cup. Their opening ceremony, in that second World Cup tournament, was criticised for being too politicised, in that it tried to emphasise England’s right to dictate the future direction of the game because of the Rugby School legacy.

The argument was made that the rugby game may well have originated on the playing fields of Rugby School, and Winchester and Eton, with their scrumming wall games. But what we know today is that the rugby game owes a lot more to the developments in the laws and practices of rugby created in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Indeed, no less authorities than John Reason, the long time rugby correspondent for The Telegraph (UK), and Carwyn James, one of the greatest coaches and a deeply informed student of rugby, argued in their BBC history of rugby that the 1905 All Blacks created the modern system of playing rugby.

So I watched the opening ceremony for the 2015 Rugby World Cup to see if this lesson had been learnt by the RFU. Alas, not. The opening credits ran: One Boy/Breaks A Rule/Creates A Game/Became A Legend. 1823.

Behind this script was an evocative re-creation of William Webb Ellis exhorting the boys of Rugby School to do their best in phrases redolent of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, with shots of Rugby School making a beautiful back-drop.

Then the film segued into dramatic clips of some of the greatest runners in rugby history, Edwards, Campese, Lomu tearing away, in brilliant solo runs, to score a terrific try.

This sequence was lovely film but awful history.

The story of William Webb Ellis is certainly an invention. In 1895, some former pupils of Rugby School forced the Rugby Football Union to hold an inquiry into the origins of the code, hoping to gain official acknowledgment that Webb Ellis was the originator of the running game.

However, evidence presented to the committee by Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, showed that Ellis, who later won a sports blue for cricket at Oxford University, had been a schoolboy cricketer, not a footballer. Hughes insisted that Jeb Mackay, in the 1840s, was the first boy at Rugby School to run the ball forward. The rules had always allowed running back.

The 1895 Committee immortalised William Webb Ellis, anyway. A plaque was created at Rugby School honouring him as the boy who picked up the ball and ran with it in 1823 thereby creating the unique feature of the rugby football game.

Why was 1895 crucial? Earlier in that year, several northern counties had broken away from the RFU and formed their own professional ‘rugby league’. The William Webb Ellis deception, in fact, was intended to entrench the public school old boys’ moral and official authority over rugby, and prevent the code from falling under the control of the lower classes and – God forbid – the colonials.

That split in 1895 of the rugby union, which was replicated in Australia and New Zealand (to a lesser extent) in 1907, prevented rugby from being the world game that football has become.

After 1895, too, rugby became a game that was class obsessed in England. This obsession was focussed on London as the spiritual and official home of rugby. There are remnants still of this. Australia, South Africa and New Zealand play their Tests in various stadiums. But the RFU, since Twickenham was developed in an outer suburb of London, has played virtually every home Test there.

When the Rugby World Cup notion was put forward by officials in Australia and New Zealand, it met the stiffest of resistance from the so-called home unions. The ARU and New Zealand Rugby Union announced that they would hold a Rugby World Cup tournament in 1987 whether the IRB agreed or not. The IRB, dominated by the RFU, then literally took over the project.

They appointed a former England player and public school headmaster John Kendall-Carpenter as the IRB’s organiser of the tournament. All the profits were to be used to set up a permanent secretariat for the IRB.

Kendall-Carpenter told the New Zealand and Australian officials who were doing all the organising work that he had purchased a cup to be named after William Webb Ellis to be given to the winning team’s union.

Any team that wins three tournaments – Australia, South Africa and New Zealand are currently in line to achieve this – gets to keep the original cup.

And what do they keep? The Webb Ellis trophy is a 38-centimetre rococo work of silver, gilded with gold. On one handle perches a satyr. On the other handle, a nymph. The cup is a florid 1906 re-creation of a cup created by the 18th century English silversmith named Paul de Lamerie.

No one knows what this 1906 cup was used for. But if you look at the top of the cup’s lid you will see a football ball wreathed in laurel sprigs!

The point about all this is that the RFU has tended to treat the Rugby World Cup as some sort of exemplar of its perceived dominance, even ownership, of the rugby game.

But all this William Webb Ellis-type ownership of rugby is a ‘beautiful lie’. The reality is that in the 28 years since the first Rugby World Cup tournament, the game has gone global and the authority of the London power brokers over the control of the game has been smashed.

This truth is taking some time for RFU officials (as any one who has had to deal with them will know) to understand. They still think that they can do anything they like with the game because it is their game.

Unfortunately, this boorishness was present at Twickenham during the opening ceremony. Why was the microphone turned off (or turned down?) so that the Fijian Cibi, their war chant, could not be heard over the crowd singing “Swing low, sweet chariot”?

And what got into ITV‘s commentator Nick Mullins mind when saying in his commentary, during the first half of play: “They will be back in Fiji around one television hoping the generator doesn’t fail them.”