By GTD
August 20 2007

I think it was Cooperman who recently started a thread entitled ‘Can Rugby Learn from Soccer?’. Well, in my opinion no, but turn the tables and soccer can indeed gain a lot from it’s neighbours of the odd-shaped variety. It was watching the recent community shield that prompted me to think about relevant rules and regs in Rugby that would really help the game,

Still ‘following’ my old team Chelsea I was, once again disappointed at the general behaviour of these multi-millionaires and the thousands of people who follow, neh worship them. Around that time I was reading my latest copy of FHM (yup still desperately trying to stay young by reading a ‘lads mag’ but I do think the fact that I was actually reading it and not just looking at the pictures speaks volumes) and in it was an article called ‘FHM Reinvents Football’. There was certainly some blatantly obvious suggestions in that article, most of which make a lot of sense but more importantly and come from the game we love :

 

-          Fit refs with microphones

o       In an attempt to stamp out player’s foul language – it might dissuade them a bit if they knew the poor fella in black was miked up. It works in rugby as you know you won’t hear the players swearing at him – could it be used to reduce swearing?

-          Introduce a sin-bin

o       Yellow and red cards don’t seem to be working. Virtually every major contact sport has a penalty box – football needs to catch up!

-          Introduce a salary cap

o       It rules out one or two teams dominating a league if they all have to pay a similar total salary bill.

-          Crack down on dissent

o       This is the biggy. The article quotes a “scandalous penalty given against England in the last minute of the World Cup final in 2003 – and not one player murmured at the ref. In football, that official would now be a pile of meat scrapings and a whistle”. A slight exaggeration but we can all picture the scene. Dissent should become a clearly bookable (sin-binnable) offence. They quote “see how quickly it stops when the first game of the season becomes 5-a-side”.

-          Ten yard advancement

o       It works in rugby – any dissent and back 10 yards – it’s a must in football – the free kick will soon be in the penalty area!

 

And what do you do with the fans? At the risk of generalising (and I am not meaning to offend anyone here) there seems to be a vast majority of fans who go to football matches to ‘get angry’. It can be aimed at the players on the opposition team, the ref, the opposition team’s fans, their own fans, their own teams players – it matters not who as long as they can wave a fist, or a combination of hand gestures/upright fingers and swear directly AT someone.

 

Stamp it out on the pitch and it has to improve in the crowd.

 

Is rugby going ‘that way’? More and more we see petulance creeping into the players. Many around me comment on it as ‘behaving like footballers’. Is it only a matter of time before we see Tonga fall to the floor as if he’s been shot by a sniper because someone pulled his shirt? Will we soon see Catty sent off for swearing at and pushing a ref?

 

Who knows…..