Tommy Martin: Rugby on the brink of domination and doom
DOMINATION AND DOOM: English referee Wayne Barnes studies the screen after a tackle from France's prop Uini Atonio on Ireland's hooker Rob Herring. Pic: Paul ELLIS / AFP
Where are we now with the rugby?
I say this having just recovered equilibrium from events in Dublin last Saturday. Rugby’s detractors are rightly sceptical of the sport’s taste for the bombastic, but it was hard not to reach for the meatier adjectives after Ireland’s win over France.
It was breathtaking. It was epic. It was compelling. Some fans in the Aviva Stadium even put their pints down for a minute. It was that good. There have been rugby matches that were more confrontational and a few that scored higher on artistic merit but not many that had all that and big dollop of goofball madness.
The ball hitting the spider cam! James Lowe’s acrobatic leap! Johnny Sexton running! Johnny Sexton running again! Funkmeister Finlay Bealham! Damien Penaud making haste for the Irish try line in the manner of Errol Flynn swinging from a chandelier! Everything Antoine Dupont!
More than all that, you had that feeling of new ground being staked, envelopes being pushed. Like the way talking heads in documentaries about the 1970s go on about seeing David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust on Top of the Pops for the first time. What is this? Is this…rugby?
It wasn’t just that it was an Irish team doing it – reaching for new heights, straining the bounds of technique and heart, finally mastering the Rach 3 then collapsing in a sweaty heap. That bit was almost incidental. After all that, it felt rather parochial to be punching the air at the mere accumulation of Six Nations points for dear old Erin.
That sense was confirmed when opening the following day’s . “Irish show the shape of things to come,” read the headline above the match report, written by the newspaper’s chief rugby mandarin, Stephen Jones, who pitched up in Dublin in the guise of a bishop sent from Rome to investigate claims of miraculous visions in some distant province.
“It was an honour just to be there, in any capacity,” wrote Jones, a man normally quick to poo-poo misplaced Irish notions. “There was dear old rugby, squarely seated upon its platform, one of the greatest sports invented,” he thumped on his keyboard through fat and joyful tears.
“It was a blistering contest…The first half had been one of the greatest ever seen, for intensity and noise, but also for all those gorgeous skills from both teams.” And this, the kicker. “What a game. And what a Six Nations so far. Yesterday in Dublin, it was as if rugby had taken on a brand new shape and size.”
There’s a staaar-man! Waiting in the skyyyy!
Yes, that seemed to sum it up, the scale and significance of Saturday: a bold vision of a dazzling future. But then you thought of another piece written in a London-based newspaper just a few weeks before. An editorial in the that described “a sport rich in drama…at a crossroads.” This piece spoke of rugby union facing “an existential crisis,” using the imminence of the Six Nations to bundle together the allegations of a “toxic culture” of misogyny, racism and homophobia in the Welsh Rugby Union, ever-present fears about the long-term effects of concussion, and the financial meltdown that had already claimed two English Premiership clubs and continues to threaten the viability of the Welsh regional structure.
“The Six Nations is the resplendent icing on the rugby cake,” the Guardian concluded, “but if the sport is not careful, there may soon be no cake.”
Which is it then, we cried, still bathed in Saturday’s dopamine afterglow? God dammit, how can rugby be both on the brink of transcendent glory and, at the same time, existential collapse?
But you didn’t need pronouncements from either side of the Fleet Street lefty-righty divide to encapsulate the dilemma. It was there 25 minutes into that classic first half, when Uini Atonio bulldozed Rob Herring like a randy lorry and most people thought it was definitely going to be a red card but were, in the back of their minds, gutted because it would ruin this amazing, amazing game.
And then, when referee Wayne Barnes made a James Lowe-style acrobatic leap of logic and found a reason not to send the Frenchman off, and his touch judge had a face on him like a wife whose husband was insisting he’d taken the right turn and it was actually the map that was wrong, we were outraged and said it was disgraceful and exactly the kind of thing rugby needs to clamp down on, but also, at the same time, thinking “yay, on with the game!”
As Atonio trudged to the sin bin, he passed the Netflix boom mic guy, positioned pitchside to capture every crunch and thump for the much talked about Six Nations documentary series. Aside from concerns about the revealing of state secrets, whispers of unease within the game centre on how much the Netflix people will focus on rugby’s inherent violence.
This is a stable that did an entire episode of the Formula One series on the death-defying crash endured by Romain Grosjean at the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix, building up the tension with indulgent slow-motion replays of the horror before showing the driver miraculously walking out of the fireball. At least Rob Herring didn’t go up in a plume of flames.
If Netflix can capture even a fraction of the drama provided by Saturday’s game, then maybe rugby’s powerbrokers might get their wish of crossover into new, lucrative markets, eager to learn more about Dave Kilcoyne and other Six Nations dreamboats. And yet, the very same 80 minutes also demonstrated the latent neurosis rugby now lives with, that terrifying futurescape of broken brains, crippling lawsuits and angry Karens marching their little ones away from the rugby club towards the safer environs of kiddy yoga and mindfulness retreats.
Rugby, then, seems at once to be plotting global domination but also looking out for the oncoming meteorite.
