What a great weekend of sport. Apart from noticing West Ham’s remarkable victory at Manchester City, I barely noticed any football results. The Rugby World Cup has been very dominating with some wonderful action and some great results already, the obvious one being the Japanese victory over South Africa.
Now, one of the reasons that football gets a bit ignored when rugby is about is because of the remarkable behaviour of the players. It’s so refreshing. Seeing the histrionics, the cheating, the finger pointing, the rolling around on the football pitch week after week is enough to sink the soul.
There was a particular incident yesterday when New Zealand were struggling to get past Argentina when All Blacks captain and most capped player Richie McCaw casually snaked out a leg to illegally trip one of the Argies who had just taken a tap penalty.
He was spotted by either one of the 4,526 cameras or possibly the touch judge and was yellow carded which means 10 minutes in the sin bin. What was remarkable was his reaction. Nothing. He just jogged to the sin bin and sat down. Not a word. Not a hopeless flailing of the arms. No teammates gathered to bully the officials. Had this been football, he would’ve been rolling about on the turf with mouth wide open in total denial of his crime, before getting an emergency limousine to Nicky Clarke’s for a soothing cut and blow dry.
Still, not all is well among the fart stained, beer puddly marbled halls of World Rugby. There seems to be a lack of total agreement with the use of the Third Match Official. Many rugby aficionados would rather all decisions be made at the discretion of the one man in the middle with the whistle and accept that he wont always be right.
The trouble is that there are so many things going on at once, he aint gonna see everything and you have to ask yourself whether it is right for results to depend totally on the observance of the referee. He can’t always be sure if that ball was grounded, that foot was in touch or whether little Johnny Tightshorts was bummed in the scrum by that 20 stone Maori.
I think it’s good that everybody has a breather for a minute whilst somebody checks the footage from all the cameras to come to the correct decision.
Going back to that Japan victory for a sec, here’s a fact for you. New Zealand’s record win is 145-17 – against Japan – just 20 years ago.
davesimba 