Peter Jackson: This is not soccer! Putting the boot into rugby's penalty shoot-out
Munster's Ben Healy takes his first kick of the place kicking shoot out
At the last count, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo had missed 54 penalties between them at a combined career average of roughly one failure in every six attempts.
Their periodic fallibility from the spot puts Ben Healy in exalted company, not that the substitute out-half from Tipperary Town will draw any solace from that source or any other given his multiple misfortune during the longest match ever witnessed anywhere in Ireland.
That Healy had twice gone close to sparing Munster the misery of the shoot-out by putting Toulouse out of theirs made the most anti-climactic of finishes all the harder to bear.
The holders survived both shots, from the last kick of normal time and again from the last kick of extra-time. Healy’s first, from more than 55 metres, required nerve as well as binoculars to track its flight. His second, a drop from half the distance, soared towards the stratosphere on the wrong trajectory.
And so, for only the second time since its inception almost 30 years ago, the tournament lurched into a penalty shoot-out. The first one, at the Millennium Stadium in May 2009 after Cardiff and Leicester had drawn their semi-final 26-26, left players, fans and officials alike of the same mind: Never again.
Nobody then had much of a clue, least of all the Tigers’ coach Richard Cockerill: ‘’We were asking: ‘How does it work?’ Do we go best kickers first or worst kickers first?’’
Martyn Williams’ shank allowed Leicester to reach the final – the first won by Leinster - 7-6 on penalties. "It’s completely unfair that we won a game of rugby because Martyn couldn’t kick the ball between the posts," their stand-off Sam Vesty said. "He was probably man-of-the-match."
Everyone agreed that the damp squib of an experiment ought to be binned on the grounds that it detracted from the occasion. The television paymasters would have seen the drama generated by football’s shoot-outs and decreed otherwise.
In that event, they may have overlooked the fact that rugby cannot provide the one ingredient which, for better or worse, makes the soccer version compulsive viewing, the goalkeeper.
They don’t have those in rugby although it may be only a matter of time before television will have them dangling on a high wire above the crossbar like Freddie Mercury in concert mode. Surely now the organisers will come to their senses and realise there is a better way to decide duels of titanic dimension.
Instead of penalties, wouldn’t it have been better by far had Munster and Toulouse kept on hammering away after extra-time until someone broke the deadlock, no matter how long it took?
A golden goal or try would have been a more satisfactory way of finding a winner, one which would have given the 40,000-plus crowd a still longer run for their money.
It would also have spared Ben Healy being exposed to an ordeal which would probably never have happened had Joey Carbery not missed penalties from eminently kickable positions either side of half-time.
Had the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules applied at Welford Road on Saturday evening, the no-contest would have been stopped to spare the English Premiership leaders further punishment.
Having dared to twist the Tigers’ tails in their own den, Leinster are now two wins away from landing a double beyond compare — a Six Nations’ Triple Crown and the Champions’ Cup in one fell swoop.
That requires only a small stretch of the imagination given that Ireland chose a complete XV of Leinster players throughout the tournament. As a club team, a case can be made for placing them nearer the top than the bottom of World Rugby’s official Test rankings.
Leinster are so powerful in every department that they would probably beat every nation outside the top four: South Africa, France, New Zealand and, for obvious reasons, Ireland. They have already beaten the rest as listed from No. 5 to No. 10: England, Australia, Scotland, Argentina, Wales, and Japan albeit while wearing green, not blue.
Despite the emphatic nature of their superiority on Saturday evening leaving Leicester with no complaints, skipper Ellis Genge managed to find one. The England prop took umbrage at being reminded of his pre-match warning that Leicester weren’t in the business of being ‘plucky losers.’ “I’m not going to come here for someone to say we gave it a crack and we’re plucky losers,’’ he said. ‘’We could have won that game.’’ What brought him to that conclusion is difficult to fathom.
Having spoken pre-match about Welford Road being ‘our gaff’, he might have been gracious to concede that Leinster in general and James Ryan in particular played as though they owned the place lock, stock and barrel.
Defending your team is admirable but there are days when the opposition leaves you no option but to acknowledge their superiority.
Teddy Thomas’ sleight of hand while somehow managing to keep his right foot a millimetre from touch put Racing en route to their second semi-final in three seasons. Finn Russell dug deep into his box of tricks to come up with the footballing skills that bamboozled the Sharks into conceding another seven-pointer.
It all added up to a second successive semi-final made up of a French trio and Leinster, the only difference being Racing instead of Bordeaux.
If Toulouse are to retain their title, they will be required to do something that no team has ever been asked to do — beat three Irish provinces, north and south, in successive rounds. As if Ulster in Belfast and Munster in Dublin wasn’t demanding enough, they must now return to the capital for what many will consider Mission Impossible — Leinster at the Aviva Stadium.
Head coach Leo Cullen has already started talking Toulouse up as ‘incredibly dangerous’. The mind boggles as to what hyperbole Ugo Mola and his coaches will use to describe Leinster.
As if they haven’t got enough going for them, they are the only one of the last four with home advantage. While their fans need only make a leisurely stroll from the RDS, those who follow Racing and La Rochelle face long journeys to their neutral venue at Lens. The city is close to the Belgian border, 100 miles from Paris and more than 400 from the Atlantic coast, where Ronan O’Gara is now 80 minutes away from steering the locals into a second successive Champions’ Cup final.
They’ve been whispering it for sometime at London Irish that Henry Arundell will be the next big thing in English rugby. Anyone scoffing at the suggestion need only look at what he did in Toulon yesterday and scoff no more.
The 19-year-old full back ran from one end of the Stade Mayol to the other with barely a hand being laid on him. He took enough changes of direction en route to leave some seven opponents flailing.
The Exiles fell infuriatingly short of clinching an all-English Challenge Cup semi-final against Saracens. Toulon survived the most electrifying try of the season by the skin of their teeth because Paddy Jackson missed the conversion.
Thomas Ramos (Toulouse)
Teddy Thomas (Racing)
Mattias Lebel (Toulouse)
Finn Russell (Racing)
Danny Priso (La Rochelle)
Pierre Bourgarit (La Rochelle)
Dorian Aldegheri (Toulouse)
Emmanuel Meafou (Toulouse)
