Innovative Italy deserve to be praised, not patronised
England into a cul-de-sac of indecision.
Perish the day when we decry either perspective, even if there is good reason to urge World Rugby to tidy up the law that allows such blatant opportunism. Sport needs character and opinion, not takeevery-game-as-it-comes platitudes.
And to those who argue that rugby is too complex for its own good, the answer is simple: go and watch something else. Football and rugby league are more overtly open games of flow and continuity. That does not make them better or worse, just different. Chess is not draughts. Play whichever takes your fancy. No one complains unduly of the intricacies of the googly or the Bosie or Bodyline leg-side field placings in cricket.
One of the fundamental appeals of rugby union is that it is a jigsaw and all the parts have to fit for it make the pretty picture that we all yearn for. O’Shea understood that and put his particular pieces into play. The Italy head coach wanted to deny England their ball, a wholly legitimate aim. And Jones would know that, too.
O’Shea is also right to berate those who have damned Italy as not worthy of a place in the Six Nations Championship as if they were an ailing old auntie who ought to be shunted off to the nearest care home and forgotten.
One thing O’Shea and his team proved on Sunday was that they are clever and resilient and purposeful. To enact such a strategy took considerable discipline as well as trust. If there was one thing that was achieved at Twickenham, it was the coming together of the Azzurri for a common cause. That sense of faith and solidarity means that the O’Shea project has some substance. As another Italian, Claudio Ranieri, found to his cost, if you do not take the players with you, then you are doomed.
When O’Shea first came to England in the mid-Nineties, Clive Woodward, who was then the London Irish coach, told him that he needed to break ranks with his countrymen and be different. It did not matter how, just go against the grain, try something, anything – as in not playing with numbers on shirts, which Woodward once tried with that London Irish side.
The same sort of thing came to pass at Twickenham, with O’Shea’s defensive sidekick, Brendan Venter, as iconoclast-in-chief, tilting at orthodox thinking, as he has always done. They are to be admired for challenging, not scorned. Or patronised.
O’Shea rightly pointed out the double standards that are invariably in play, the praise lavished on the well-rounded Wallaby flanker David Pocock when he adopted the tactic, or, for that matter, Richie McCaw, hailed as a cerebral warrior when he used the laws apparently to enter a tackle zone from the wrong side.
Enough of these dismissive pats on the head for Italy, or Georgia, or Tonga, or Japan. They have all earned the right to share an international rugby field.
It will have been a one-off ploy, for it depended on surprise to make it effective. What it did expose was England’s inability to work out matters on the hoof, albeit it should be noted that they did earn a bonus point on their way to scoring six tries. That is a decent return for a supposedly shoddy day’s work.
The final two weeks of the championship offer so much in prospect. The upturn in Scottish fortunes, only a short time after they were getting the must-go treatment now being handed out to Italy, has been a heartening, as well as a human feature, a potentially suitable two-fingered send-off from head coach Vern Cotter, whose tenure is up after the final game this season. Not that the Kiwi would ever resort to such behaviour.
There are many scenarios still in play, a title, a Grand Slam, a world-record number of wins. And another rope-a-dope tactic? Who knows? It will keep us all watching.