Cherry Pickings: Eye of the storm (From Gazette Series)

Rugby column by ex-Gloucester coach and captain Keith Richardson

2:00pm Thursday 22nd October 2009 in Gloucestershire Sport

THE International Rugby Board is determined to get tough and crack down on gouging - or so it says! Tough words are easy and they followed up the announcement with a 12-week ban on Leinster’s Shane Jennings for trying to get his fingers into Nick Kennedy’s eye-socket during the Heineken Cup match against London Irish.

If that sounds odd, consider South Africa’s Shalk Burger’s punishment of eight weeks for attempting to re-focus Luke Fitzgerald’s visual orientation.

And our own Olivier Azam failed to overturn a twelve-week ban for kicking just after he’d been found bang to rights on fingering somebody’s eyeball.

I can only assume that the game is afraid of players bringing in m’learned friends to argue vehemently against restraint of trade.

But we need to get into the real world. How many ‘normal’ people could try to blind somebody at work, get a deserved length of time sewing mailbags (or whatever they sew these days of an impending postal strike) then complain that they can’t earn a crust at their place of work where they carried out the attack?

I am not asking for the game to be emasculated and am certainly not against a bit of shoe - as long as the boot is rucking and going in a backward movement.

There will always be incidents where players start fighting. Misunderstanding is all too easy in such a physical game. But once eye-gouging is punished leniently, you have no game.

Players themselves have a secret-society code of conduct where you don’t rat on your mates (mates meaning opponents), but they are the very people who should be pressing for harsher sanctions for this offence.

There is very often some doubt as to why and how a skirmish started, but we should not allow any uncertainty to enter into the world of eye-gouging. It can’t be trivialised and needs harsher punishments for the guilty.

If that wasn’t enough for the week, we had to suffer a real whacking in Biarritz. This is the most beautiful town imaginable, but I can’t imagine the travelling Gloucester faithful found much of beauty down there in the Atlantic surf.

The surf may have given some of them instant relief after watching a drubbing and counting the financial cost now that the euro and the pound are just about on a par, but they have such good lifeguards that simple suicide was probably a non-starter after the match.

We seemed to have given up on the match well before Saturday - and what sort of message did Jake Boer’s dramatic return signal? He has been an outstanding player for the club over many games, but was it really necessary to signal panic with all the news about flights, last-minute plans and frantic visa arrangements?

Was there not a forward in the Gloucester Academy who would have been gagging to be part of the squad, even if it was for one week only? It is possible that a future star might have been blooded at Biarritz, but now we’ll never know.

And even with the excellent Boer, we still lost so also missed the opportunity to look at a future contender.

When Sale travelled down to Toulouse for their drubbing, they used their Academy players and would at least have learned something about their young players. All we found out is that Jake Boer is still a very effective player - but we already knew that.

Do you agree with Keith?