Once more unto the breach it would seem, as the All Blacks prepare to face a judiciary process with Brodie Retallick, hoping to win a soft sanction after he was red carded in Tokyo.
Head coach Ian Foster has already suggested the All Blacks legal team will make animpassioned defence of Retallick’s actions as a run of the mill cleanout that had neither any intent nor a high degree of danger as Kazuki Himeno barely seemed to notice that the All Blacks lock had charged into him.
“It looked pretty innocuous from a number of angles, but we’ll do our talking in the judiciary,” Foster said.
“We want to go and present a pretty strong rugby case for it, but we’ll just have to see what unfolds.”
It’s tempting to dismiss Foster’s comments as the typical defensive reaction of a coach who doesn’t want to lose a key player for the big games ahead, and some commentators have already branded Retallick’s actions as dumb and needless.
But those who believe Retallick made an avoidable error of judgement should consider the opinion of Scotland coach Gregor Townsend, who spoke about an almost identical incident in Edinburgh over the weekend.
Scotland lock Glen Young was yellow carded for a cleanout on Wallabies halfback Tate McDermott.
“An athletic second row sprinting to get with the ball carrier and it’s a millimetre away from being the best clearout you will ever see to hitting the smallest guy on the field in the head area,” Townsend explained.
“It’s the game. I personally believe that jackals should be taken out. There are too many injuries on the jackalled player and there is too much risk of where do you take someone out?
“We have to win the races to win contacts and so we are encouraging our players to sprint to win that race because if you don’t win the race, then you are not going to be able to move that jackalled player.
“So if someone is sprinting, thinking he’s going to win the race, he is not going to slow down a yard before the ruck. There is not enough time so it’s either a world class bit of play or a yellow card and there is nothing you can do about it unless you decide not to go to the ruck and let the player win the ball.”
Gregor Townsend. Photo / Getty
This is why rugby needs to be careful about singling out specific cleanouts as dangerous when the process the player followed was the same as it had been for the 30 to 40 other rucks they hit in the same game.
Referee Nika Amashukeli said Retallick “came from a distance”, the relevance of which is hard to understand as he was simply running as far as he had to, to get to the ball and players fly into rucks at full speed, “from distance” all the time.
The implication of course is that this was premeditated, deliberate and avoidable, as if Retallick, like an angry bull, walked slowly back to his mark, shuffled his feet and then charged, and yet he was just doing what he did all game.
The act of hitting a ruck at speed from a distance is not illegal or dangerous per se, but an expected part of the role. As Townsend says, the whole game is built on racing to the ball and so what did everyone expect Retallick to be able to do in the split second he had to decide his course of action as he approached the ruck?
Amashukeli said there was a high degree of danger, but given players fly into rucks at speed all the time, isn’t there a high degree of danger at every collision?
Retallick, of course, is no stranger to this very fact as he almost missed the last World Cup when he was cleaned out of a ruck by RG Snyman in the Rugby Championship and dislocated his shoulder.
And it’s the arbitrary nature of it all that troubles coaches and players. Retallick was red carded, Young yellow carded and back in 2019, Snyman wasn’t hit with any sanction.
They pretty much all did the same thing — ran at speed into a ruck to clean someone out, with low body positions and despite the fact Retallick was deemed to have tucked his shoulder, most angles suggest his right arm was in the motion of wrapping around Himeno.
The next few days will be a feeding frenzy for social media as armchair experts dissect Retallick’s actions and the findings of the judiciary, but this circus needs to end.
Rugby bosses need to clean-up the cleanout — it’s a dangerous, nonsensical mess the way it is refereed and as Townsend says, the margin between being world class and sent off are ridiculously thin.
