Force usurps skill and guile - Rugby at a decisive crossroads

RUGBY is at at a decisive crossroads. It can continue its evolution towards a sport where physical domination is everything, with the awful collateral damage that brings, or it can try to return to a more balanced, ecumenical, and probably more skilful game.

One route may promise higher television ratings but the cost would be one of the world’s great field games and thousands of young men with broken bodies, incapacitated before middle age. Whether the sport, or its paymasters, have the inclination to reform is questionable; whether the sport’s administrators — the infamous blazers — still have the authority to do that is a real question too.

Saturday’s match between Ireland and France — nominally anyway, at least six nations were represented — was more like the Battle of Kursk than a game once based on guile, courage, fleetness of foot, courage, and endurance. It may not yet be as freakish as professional wrestling but it’s far closer than its promoters might imagine.