RUGBY IS a thug's game played by gentlemen," or so the saying goes, but last weekend in the Heineken Cup that well-worn claim was outed for the claptrap it really is. Wasps played against Leinster in the so-called Battle of the Capitals. There were over 30,000 fans at Twickenham to witness a match with all the intensity, if not quite the same level of skills, as a fully fledged international.
It was vital for Wasps to win the match and to prevent the Dubliners from claiming a losing bonus point which meant that Leinster would top the group going into the last round of matches, which is exactly what happened.
Leading by four points and
awarded a penalty in the final minute, Wasps needed the five points a try would give them to deny Leinster the crucial extra point. Their skipper Phil Vickery took stock of the situation, he weighed up the probabilities and he pointed at the posts! Leinster got their bonus point and they should do enough this afternoon against Edinburgh to ensure they top the group while Wasps will have to get five points at Castres and then hope.
If Vickery simply wasn't thinking straight he can be forgiven since Ireland's most capped player in the history of the game, Malcolm O'Kelly, had planted his size elevens on the prop's head not long before. Vickery was on the wrong side of a ruck, O'Kelly looked down, took aim and kicked the Englishman hard in the head… twice. The touch judge was perfectly positioned, the incident was caught in all its gruesome detail on the television cameras and the French referee decided that the action merited a 10-minute stint in the sin bin. Since the same referee had already binned Leinster winger Rob Kearney for preventing Wasps from taking a quick line-out it is clear that he judges a kick in the head to be more of a misdemeanour than a serious crime.
The crowd were enraged, the commentators were perplexed. The rest of the world then gasped in slack-jawed amazement after O'Kelly, hauled before a disciplinary hearing last week, was banned for two weeks. Two weeks! Had the Irishman kicked someone in the head on Twickenham's High Street instead of the main pitch he would have earned himself a custodial sentence at Her Majesty's pleasure but because he did it on a rugby field he gets a two-week ban from the game.
And this is where Matt Stevens, pictured, comes into the equation. The Bath and England prop is widely expected to be banned for two years for failing a drugs test for a "very serious substance" that, according to Home Office statistics, more than 750,000 people try every year. It is not performance enhancing, Stevens was cheating no one other than himself.
Sober analysts write that the South African-born forward will never play for England again and that he will be lucky if Bath don't show him the door but no one has suggested that Stevens should be locked up because, provided he isn't augmenting his salary by dealing in recreational drugs, the police are largely uninterested. They would offer him no more than a slap on the wrist for his use of an illegal drug, if that much.
So a crime that merits a sympathetic shrug of the shoulders and the offer of counselling in the real world is somehow deserving of a two-year ban in rugby's warped universe. Yet a crime that merits a prison sentence in the real world, O'Kelly's kick to Vickery's head, somehow merits nothing more than a two-week ban from the sport.
The two judgments can't both be right. Either the entire world has got its ethical knickers in a horrible twist or the game of rugby union has.
All change as Edinburgh opt to experiment in DublinEDINBURGH will field what can generously be dubbed an 'experimental' side in Dublin this afternoon to mark the end of what has been yet another disappointing Heineken Cup campaign. Andy Robinson's men cannot qualify for the knockout rounds and given that Leinster are locked in a dog fight with Wasps to claim the top spot in Pool 2 and automatic entry to the quarter-finals, there seems little doubt about who will win the match.
While Robinson will admit to resting a couple of big names in Mike Blair and Ben Cairns, there are several more suspicious-looking injuries that evidently warrant a weekend on the sidelines just ahead of the Six Nations. All in all just seven names survive the opening match of this campaign back in October when four Leinster tries in the opening 30 minutes put paid to Edinburgh's Heineken Cup campaign almost before it had started.
Allan Jacobsen's problematic shoulder means that Watsonians skipper Kyle Traynor gets his first start for Edinburgh, just when his club needs him most. Further out, Phil Godman has a hamstring injury, sure to be fine for the Wales match in two weeks' time, which has allowed David Blair a rare chance to partner Craig Laidlaw at half-back.
Chris Paterson also gets some much-needed game time at full-back, the position in which Scotland are most likely to utilise the versatile player, while his rival Hugo Southwell is another whose shoulder prevents him from playing.
The mathematics of the group means that a bonus-point victory for Leinster should ensure that they top the pool despite the fact that, provided Wasps can beat Castres in France, Ian McGeechan's men will have claimed five wins to Leinster's four. The Dubliners have grabbed four bonus points to date, two losing and two try bonuses, and they are a short nose ahead of Wasps by dint of winning more points in the matches played between the two clubs.
Edinburgh used to be something of a bogey team for Leinster but the boot is very much on the other foot right now. The Dublin side cantered to a 52-6 win last September in the Magners League before underlining their authority by blowing Edinburgh away in that Heineken Cup match.
In fact Robinson tipped none other than this afternoon's opponents for Heineken Cup glory before a ball was kicked in anger.
The full article contains 1064 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
