Something has been nagging me about the Neil Back incident during the Heineken Cup final. Not to such an extent that I'll sign up to the campaign to make rugby take a leaf out of golf's book, which is apparently a model of probity. If rugby aped golf the first thing many of its clubs would have to do would be to exclude their black and Jewish members. Moral uprightness around the greens and ethnically cleansed in the clubhouse; I think I'll stick to the mongrel roguishness of rugby, thank you.
But something wasn't right about the deed whereby Back slapped the ball out of scrum-half Peter Stringer's hands as he prepared to put the ball into, who knows, an all-important last-chance scrum for Munster.
There's little point in banging on about the tendency in rugby to break the laws of the game. Any activity that insists on straight feeds and straight throw-ins is immediately flirting with micro-definitions of accuracy. Add the basic concept of this being a high-speed but big-contact, congested but space-yearning sport to the knowledge that little, if anything, on a windy day can be straight, and wrap it all up in a law book as impenetrable as Yung Sok's Ruminations on a Peasant's Hoe, and you have created a mother of complicated sports. In short, you can stop the action at any given moment and find at least three infractions.
The referee is everything. No, the four officials are everything. They must interpret which infractions are relevant to the immediate play. And the nearer you get to the final whistle of a cliff-hanger the more that interpretation dominates proceedings.
In the 2000 Heineken Cup semi-final between Llanelli and Northampton, a penalty was awarded against Ian Boobyer of Llanelli in injury time. The wing-forward flicked out a boot while lying on the ground and dislodged the ball from a Northampton player's grasp. Off-side. Penalty. Up steps Paul Grayson; Northampton steal the game.
Boobyer's was an act born of tension and fatigue, a weary reflex action committed without premeditation but carrying a heavy price. It was spotted by the referee. On both fronts it differed from the Back incident.
Joel Jutge, the French referee, had placed himself on the opposite side of the scrum from Back to check on the Munster tight-head. Quite rightly, the referee had pinpointed the tight-head of the side putting in the ball as the point of pressure. He had penalised Darren Garforth of Leicester several times for not binding and for turning in.
Incidentally, Garforth could not conceal his fury at these decisions. In his book, Peter Clohessy - and his replacement Marcus Horan - were turning in on him. But Jutge was quite right to suppose that if a tight-head, with the full weight of second and back rows behind him, cannot withstand the one-man slide and drive of a loose-head, he cannot be doing his job properly.
If a loose-head wants to turn his backside out of the line of the drive and push into the scrum, he is on his own. Where is the weight of his own second row going? Nowhere. The second-rowers must split to accommodate the prop's angle. Once you split, all the power of the drive is lost. The only reason for a loose-head to choose to lose his hydraulics is to put his head under his opposing tight-head's chin and drive him up out of the scrum. Pop goes the tight-head. Penalty, may say the referee.
But one forward nudge by the side putting the ball in - on engagement, or, like France and Argentina as the ball comes in - and not only is the opposing loose-head's angle of attack annulled, but he is likely to be in a lot of trouble himself, with his ribs exposed. Now, with a prop exposed thus, the temptation to break a few laws and ribs is almost overwhelming...
Sorry, I digress. But you see how easy it is to be lured away? Anyway, the goings-on in the front row were important because they took Jutge from the put-in side of the scrum. So, there is the referee on the opposite side of the scrum to Back. The foxy flanker thinks about his options, weighs up the risks and flicks the ball out of Stringer's hands, into his own second row. The touch judge on Stringer's side misses the incident too. Back is not penalised, Leicester clear their line and the final is won.
The nag is not that Jutge or his touch judge missed the flick. Nor that Back even committed the flick and exposed the flaw of rugby in its ongoing quest to become a sport of mass appeal. There is so much going on that the referee misses, what chance does an audience, not inculcated with the spirit of interpretative analysis, have to understand the game's inner workings? We pundits, former players, all sort of smirked and said: 'These things happen. Good luck to him; he got away with it.' Not even that haunts me.
No, the nagging thorn is Back's own analysis. Tension and fatigue, even in the 80th minute, hardly apply to this most driven of trainers, this most unflappable of performers. He weighed up the risks and flicked out his hand. 'You have to do these things to win the Heineken Cup,' he said. So cold-blooded, so callous. It makes you wish that the touch judge had seen the little hand of Back, had yellow-carded him and that Munster had scored through the hole left. It makes you wonder if the game, already struggling with declining viewing figures, will not be punished further for its cynicism.
Gawd, I'm so nagged by doubt that I'm off to the golf course. To limit the damage done to the name of rugby the only thing I can think of is to cheat like hell from 1st to 18th.
