Bloodgate and Beyond

The Media loves a scandal like flies love shit; and you’d have to be crueller than Satan himself to deny us our opportunity to wallow in Harlequin’s schoolboy attempts at cheating this summer. However, the notion that the event (ominously dubbed “Bloodgate” by journalists and commentators) has left Rugby’s reputation “lying in tatters” is a ridiculous assertion that only a sexually-repressed football loving Guardian reader would entertain.

Firstly, and for anyone who managed to avoid rugby union’s summer spectacle, let’s have a brief wallow. Following a string of injuries which left them without a specialist goal kicker in their Heineken Cup quarter-final against Leinster, Harlequins winger Tom Williams spontaneously and conveniently contracted the Ebola virus, dribbling increasingly implausible quantities of blood. When all he needed was a tampon to chew on, Quinn’s speedily blood-binned him, shipped on a specialist kicker and refused an offer of assistance from the Leinster Physio.

After a summer-long media scrummage and hearings with European Rugby Cup & the RFU, Quinn’s have learnt the hard way that the old “facial menstruation” routine works wonders in some circles (Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight, 2008) but has no place in professional rugby. As a result of a “dastardly” plan involving fake blood capsules, captured on comical but un-broadcast match footage, Quinn’s gained nothing (Nick Evans missed a late field goal to lose the match 5-6) and lost a manager, a Physio, a player and two hundred and fifty eight thousand pounds.

Clearly, this is embarrassing to the sport. But the extent to which it does so is overestimated by people who have never played rugby at any level, and have no experience of certain truisms about the game. They cling to clichéd notions that this is a game of honour “a thug’s game played by gentlemen”. Players hold their heads high, and stick to a strict moral code: any breach of the laws of the game is intolerable, and would be an absurd flouting of decorum and grace.

This is not the case. There are many areas of the game where “cheating” as such occurs. Flowery articles in the Sunday Times about “that time before my balls had dropped when I had my first rugby match and my coach told me breaking the rules was really bad and such like” are written by people who played for losing teams. One of my earliest rugby memories is of being coated in bruises from a training session where we were taught how to rake most effectively. If an opposing player kills the ball (falls to the floor in the centre of a ruck or maul, preventing quick play) we were taught, when you are meters from the line, any decent referee will let you give him a “Cornish tan”, but none will give you the penalty try that’s probably deserved.

What made the episode so bad was not that it broke the laws, but that it was a cowardly, comic and cynical attempt to take advantage of special rules designed to ensure safety. As any colts player would tell you, if Williams had done it properly and just torn out some stitches/deliberately cut himself, etc. we wouldn’t have been here and he wouldn’t have looked like such a massive clunge.

The other issue of course was that in-between sniffles, Williams told of a brutal regime, threats and instructions coming from the upper echelons of the club. This is admittedly, a more worrying issue, but parity can be drawn to clubs which feign a front-row injury in order to go to uncontested scrums, trading 18-stone juggernauts for nimble back row forwards. In both cases, a cynical manoeuvre = unauthorised replacements and a sometimes influential advantage. The uncontested scrum rules are something the RFU is looking into, and a law variation is needed.

Ultimately, ambitious teams are always going to attempt to get away with reprehensible conduct, but rugby’s regulatory bodies are there to, and have the ability to amend the laws in order to combat this. For example, all that’s required to prevent faked blood injuries is requiring (at the higher levels) for any blood-subbed player to be examined by the opposing physio.

This kind of firefighting can also be effective at the lower levels. Teams claiming they are unable to contest a scrum has been a major problem in our college divisions – teams often cynically refusing to contest in order to deny teams with powerful forwards (such as St. John’s) the opportunity to utilise their legitimate advantage. An effective law variation was trialled in last season’s cupper’s tournament. If a team was unable to field a scrum, any scrum awarded to their opponents was instead a free-kick (a significant advantage). This was an extremely effective deterrent for teams considering unethical tactics, and The Tab believes using the varaiation in this season’s league competition would encourage a more honest and exciting competition; let’s usher away a summer of sensationalist and unhelpful journalism.