Rugby falls prey to evil condition

The root of all rugby's evils

Talk about kicking someone when he's down. Rugby took a felling blow with the Matt Stevens revelations in January. The body shots have not stopped since.

Eye-gouging, an incidence of cheating so intricate it plumbs the very depths of institutionalised deception and moral corruption, missed drugs tests, lies, mis-management, hooliganism, referee assault, all these unwelcome viruses have infected rugby's bloodstream. If rugby were an animal, it would be touch and go whether to put it down for its own good or not.

But all of these are symptoms, by-products, manifestations of a sinister disease eating away at rugby's fibres, a debilitating condition that can only be treated with the greatest of care and delicacy by the most skilled of doctors and psychologists. Like a physiological dependency, it produces varied symptoms popping up in all sorts of shapes and forms, yet if left untreated will spread and cause major sickness, even death.

The laymen call it money. To the educated layman, it is often termed filthy lucre - emphasis on the filthy. To the doctors, the administrators tasked with helping the game evolve and keeping it alive, it is described more scientifically: investment, sponsorship, operating profit, player budgets.

Like alcohol, in moderation it is harmless - it even promotes health and vitality. An occasional overdose can cause heady pleasure, often with only a brief hangover, soon forgotten and recovered from. Mistakes made in such moments can be forgiven provided no harm is done. In many instances, as an oil for the game's interactive progression, it is a pre-requisite.

But rugby is teetering on an addiction to money and its effects. Too much is being ingested too regularly. The sport lurches from one hangover to the next, with onlookers from other sports pondering how long it will be before the friends of the game realise that rugby has moved beyond just needing a spot of money now and then and needs to be treated for a full-blown case of greed.

We don't live in an age of rugby's sporting honour any more. It's a competitive sport which will always be a quest to be the best. Some clubs and teams will always be bigger then others.

But when money is thrown into the equation, that quest is instantly corrupted. Loyalty, pride, dignity and respect all become as purchaseable as facilities at a club or franchise (has there ever been a more horrible and faceless term used to describe a team?) You see Bryan Habana's father flying his son in to Cape Town for a talk with Western Province, with even Habana himself asking: 'what for?' It can only be a bargaining tool with which to get more money out of the Blue Bulls. In that moment, even the loyalty of a player of Habana's standing becomes cheaply commoditised, with Habana having precious little say in the matter.

Dean Richards attempted to use his 'passion for the club' as mitigation for his orchestration of the most deplorable act of contrived cheating ever witnessed in a major rugby tournament. Would he have felt the need to do that had there not been so much money at stake? Would there have been the pressure upon him to win like that - and to stoop to such low levels as hanging poor Tom Williams out to dry?

With money comes accountability - once businessmen get their mitts on something, humanity tends to disappear. 'Failure' - finishing second - becomes a stain upon characters and a blow to ego, not the inevitable by-product of sporting participation, no longer a poor second fiddle to the joy and achievement of participation. Someone is always accountable for failure, just as someone is always accountable for success. Someone is always made to suffer, just as others are deified to ridiculous proportions when things go well.

This is why referees get such a raw deal these days. Perhaps the worst of the recent incidents in the game involved the liberal soaking of referee Willie Roos with a brandy and coke in Kimberley. He was deemed to have 'failed' the Griquas supporter in question. It would have been worthwhile that man noting that the Griquas were able to play on without the two sin-binned players. Without Roos, there wouldn't have been a game at all. Referees never win, for someone, they always fail.

This is also why we have reports from New Zealand and South Africa of appalling parent behaviour at age-grade matches. Why we have coaches who don't pick players at U9 level because they are not able to commit books of pre-rehearsed moves to memory. And why, upon losing a match to a last-minute penalty, fans and players of the Heidelberg club in South Africa felt it necessary to go on the rampage in Mossel Bay - if you've missed out on the most revolting pustule ever to burst on the face of rugby, check the benchmark here.

With too much money and too little guidance comes irresponsibility. So you get any number of New Zealand rugby players committing all manner of drunken sins, Bath rugby players able to afford a ludicrously expensive drug habit, others too arrogant and cash and agent-empowered to realise that if they were innocent, why not help the club repair a damaged reputation by taking a drug test and showing off their own clean slates?

A lack of money management ensures some teams horde it all. So in France you have the crazy situation where some clubs cannot guarantee half the budget guaranteed by others in the same top flight, while another club can field no fewer than ten top internationals even while seven others are on a mandatory rest period. And moan about it. While one club fills its books with a staggering 25 internationally-capped players, two others from the top two divisions in France have to merge just to survive.

Do I go on? Do I mention the selling out of traditional domestic tournaments in the south? Dare I utter the motivation behind the fragmentation of the Super 15 - namely a cheap attempt at marketing strategies to get bums on seats? Do I examine the motivation behind sticking your fingers in somebody's eyes during a match and question whether it is a matter of national pride or pressure of failure created by money? Should I bemoan the corruption of semi-professional tornaments the world over where the gulf between haves and have-nots becomes ever more laughable?

Should I point at the systemic cheating, disrespect to referees, animalistic fan behaviour, lack of role models and abhorrent amounts of money kicking around in soccer and warn that this is the way rugby is headed?

How can I, when rugby seems to have sunk so close to that level already? It's come to something when even soccer can point at rugby and laugh.

Rugby is dangerously addicted to money. It's a long road back to finding the dignity and respect which relegated money to secondary importance, to where it was only used where needed and in proportionate measures. Only the next generation of players can be relied upon to help the sport out of its current mire and regain its pride.

So in order to facilitate that, I will point you hopefully in the direction of some words written by my colleague Paul Dobson, a wise man who understands and underpins the ethos of our game more than anybody else I know.

Read and digest.

By Danny Stephens