Iain Morrison: Rugby is slavishly copying all the idiocies of the round-ball game

THE NEWS that four England players have been named in an alleged sex crime in New Zealand did nothing but sink the spirits. Whatever the truth behind the story, and at the very least the four involved were guilty of crass stupidity, it was just another example of the way in which rugby manages to ape all the very worst excesses of football.

It might also be worth nothing that had the allegations been made about footballers rather than rugby players the players would have had a much tougher ride. For one the English broad sheets would not have been so quick to suggest that the players were victims of a set-up.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me… so the saying goes. Football had the good sense to turn professional 105 years before rugby and in that time the game has made just about every mistake going. Rugby has been professional since 1996. It has had all the time in the world to study and note every idiocy of its round-ball relation and it has slavishly copied almost all of them.

1/ Too many (meaningless) matches. Check!

There are too many matches in both codes and two many rugby tests are between weakened sides with nothing much at stake leading to player burnout and fan apathy. The off season for both sports is over in the blink of an eye. A little rarity is a good thing although for financial reasons rarity is, err, increasingly rare. The All Blacks played England four times in the 1970's and thrice in the 1980's. The two teams have already met eight times since 2000 and that number will be well into double figures by the time the decade is out. Moreover anyone who paid their hard earned cash to watch a weakened England team play New Zealand a couple of weeks back deserves both an apology and a refund.

2/ A Premier League full of forigners. Check!

Just as Arsenal struggle to find a cockney accent in their ranks so too many of today's top European rugby clubs resemble the foreign legion. Over one third of players in the Guinness Premiership are foreign and the Magners League is scarcely any better. Irish province Leinster has just hired CJ van der Linde and Rocky Elsom from South Africa and Australia respectively, which only means two less Irishmen for Declan Kidney to choose from come the autumn tests. Even the lowly Dragons, the poorest of the Welsh clubs, have hired four Kiwis in the off-season. Scotland has avoided this trap, by and large, though it is due to abject poverty as much as to superior strategic planning.

3/ When the domestic market has been bled dry, move abroad. Check!

Just as several of the larger Premiership club were pining to play an extra league match abroad so too rugby's top nations have their greedy eyes on foreign markets. New Zealand and Australia will play one Bledisloe Cup game in Hong Kong this year and Ireland have agreed in principle to play the Springboks in the UAE.

4/ Doing the dying swan act. Check!

Nothing infuriates fans more than footballers who collapse as though hit by a sniper when they are the victim of nothing worse than a dirty look. It is not widespread in rugby but it is beginning to creep in. Check out Youtube for a video of Marius Joubert writhing on the floor after a tap on the head from Munster's Rua Tupoki and feel shame that he calls himself a rugby player and a Springbok centre at that. Hasn't he heard of Dannie Gerber? (http://rugbydump.blogspot.com/2008/02/marius-joubert-play-acting-after-tap-on.html)

5/ Pay them too much money. Not Yet In Rugby.

It was once said of a soccer star that he earned more money than he was worth with his first pay packet and given that a month's salary can now stretch to £130,000 the statement was probably correct. Rugby's highest earners are the likes of Dan Carter and Matt Giteau with the latter getting something in the region of £550,000 per season from the Western Force. However they are the exception to the rule. A pro-team player on his first contract in Scotland may only be on £25-30,000 with the average wage around the £55,000 mark.

6/ Trying to get your opponent sent off. Check!

Rugby players are a little less obvious about it, only rarely do they go miming a yellow card at the referee, but they do it all the same. Any penalty near the line will be greeted with a suggestion to the referee that the spectators would surely benefit from a more open game…nudge, nudge.

7/ Put the players on a pedestal and cosset them from the real world. Not Yet In Rugby.

Of all the issues this is the most dangerous. There is a well-known story of a young footballer who flew off on a family holiday but omitted to bring his passport because his club had always appointed someone to look after those things. Players are cosseted by minders, media managers and PR buffoons. They are told what to say and when to say it so that they scarcely have an original thought in their head. An irresponsible media lauds them as heaven sent and the irresponsible players believe what they hear and read. Once you take players out of society they quite naturally think that they are no longer bound by society's rules, which brings us back to the case of the four Englishmen in New Zealand.

Rugby has not followed as far as football in this respect but there are worrying signs that it is going the same way and the incident in Auckland will only accelerate the trend. From now on England players will have less access to the wider public when on tour rather than more, there will be more barriers and less communication, less cultural exchange and more suspicion. In short rugby players will have morphed into footballers and a large part of what makes our sport unique will have been lost for good.