The greatest time-wasting Test of them all

We should be half expecting British and Irish Lions coach Warren Gatland to produce a video this week, but let’s hope he doesn’t because it will provide the most unentertaining film footage in the history of the genre.

“Hi, I’m Warren Gatland and I want to show you a video of time passing.”

While Rassie Erasmus’s little private video that somehow went viral had some interesting footage of incidents that the referees were blind to, Gatland’s will be of nothing happening while a clock ticks.

South Africans will be happy the Springboks won the second Test to square the series and set up an intriguing finale this coming weekend, but rugby’s stakeholders, particularly those who understand the need to sell the sport aggressively in a fastevolving entertainment market, should not be happy.

I was at Cape Town Stadium and found it hard to suppress my frustration at the several minutes of nothing that were consumed as the referee and his assistants checked, and then rechecked, just about every happening in the game.

I kept a record. When my watch reflected that it was 6.40pm, meaning 40 minutes after kickoff and what should have been the build-up to the halftime siren, the game itself had seen only 24 minutes of play. That was while the referees were conferring over the incident that eventually saw Cheslin Kolbe yellow-carded, so it went beyond 42 minutes before we saw action again. When the siren sounded for half-time, we were on 63 minutes.

Of course and this is why we should expect a response from Gatland it did help the Boks. They were the team that went in with question marks hanging over their readiness to sustain a high-octane approach over a full 80 minutes following what had happened in the first Test. Forcing a sprinter to go at marathon pace helps the marathoner.

It was why when the Boks ended the 63-minute first half just three points behind, it felt like a win for them. Given the win-at-any-cost attitude that has enveloped the series, it felt like a win for Erasmus too, a justification for his hard-core off-field quest to influence the minds of the match officials and perhaps deflect the pressure off his own players.

Given the pressure they were under, there were always going to be two ways the referees were going to react they were either going to be like Bryce Lawrence was in the 2011 World Cup quarterfinal by being too scared to make decisions, or they were going to overcompensate in the other direction. They did the latter.

Ben O’Keefe was excellent with the whistle. Unfortunately pedantic is the way you have to go when you know every decision is going to be scrutinised and picked over. But when it takes several minutes of watching the same video over and over again to make a decision, it doesn’t do anything for entertainment value and it certainly takes the fatigue factor out of the sport.

Yet while it was a bit like responding to a hand grenade with an A-bomb, Erasmus’s leaked video was probably as much needed for the good of the global game as it was by the Boks. For regardless of what you might think of Erasmus for responding to Gatland with the off-field rugby battle equivalent of the bombing of Dresden, it does highlight what is wrong with the modern game.

I can remember who refereed almost all the big rugby games, but don’t ask me who was umpiring in any of the Proteas blowouts in World Cup cricket games, even though I’ve watched all of them.

That’s because it doesn’t matter so much in cricket who the umpire is there isn’t the same leeway given to subjective law interpretation that there is with referees in rugby. That probably holds for soccer too. You don’t get cricket and soccer captains and coaches trying to influence the officials like Gatland did before the first Test.

On that point, let’s also remember that many of those media who are now criticising Erasmus actually praised Gatland, who started the war and is not above censure himself, for being “street smart”. The Boks were accused of being caught napping. Those criticisms would have played a role in directing the Erasmus response.

Last week was not the first time Erasmus reacted when he was rightly aggrieved by refereeing that cost his team a game. Think back to the loss to the All Blacks in the opening game of the 2019 World Cup when Jerome Garces got his calls in the scrums patently wrong, at great cost to the Boks.

One of Erasmus’s biggest achievements at that World Cup was to get Garces to “see a different picture”, which he did in the World Cup final, to his team’s benefit.

That so much emotional and intellectual energy needs to be directed at creating the right picture for the referees is a big problem for the sport and creates unnecessary sideshows.