The 16th man
January 26 2010
So the Ospreys are through to the last eight of the Heineken Cup. But is this to be another tournament overshadowed by accusations of cheating?
The Ospreys' use of sixteen men on the pitch for nigh on a minute of their pivotal match against Leicester is not on the scale of bloodgate, but it merits a scrutinous gaze rather than the nonchalant glance that some issues like this appear to get.
Leicester are aggrieved. They feel the Ospreys have cheated their way to victory, that Lee Byrne's defensive presence as the 16th man was a defining moment in the game. The Ospreys are playing it cagey, leaving it to the officials. ERC are promising to look at what happened.
Tournament protocols suggest the Ospreys will be hit with a fine. The Tigers want the game replayed, arguing the 16th man, in direct contrast to when England did it to Samoa at the last World Cup, had a material effect on the game and its outcome.
What's to do?
The one side that will be the most interesting is that of the match officials and of Ospreys Logistics manager Dani Delamere - who looked aghast as Alan Lewis came to the touchline and delivered his opinion of the goings-on: 'It's a nonsense, it's a nonsense'.
Was the fourth official properly informed of the Ospreys' intent to bring Byrne back on? Had the message been relayed to either Sonny Parker or Dan Biggar at all? Or was it a case of getting Byrne back on at all costs and forgetting the protocols in the haste?
One aspect of all this you can probably discount is any deliberate attempt to put a 16th man on the pitch. Could anyone conceivably be that stupid (that's what they said about purchasing a blood capsule and trying to pass it of as an injury - ed.) as to try and pull the wool over somebody's eyes like that.
On that basis alone, it would be churlish to imagine the game will be replayed or that the Ospreys would be docked points. It was stupid, it was illegal, but it was not cheating in the 'bloodgate' sense of the word. It's like the difference between a dump tackle gone a bit wrong and a full-on spear tackle. One gets a yellow card, the other one a red.
The mechanism for replacements needs a good looking at and a good review. We have lost count of the number of times the phrase 'the game lost its momentum as replacements came on' has been used in match reports over the past five years, because making them takes so long and there's just so many, particularly with the constant comings and goings for blood and the decision to be taken whether a player is substituted for tactical reasons or not.
For openers, if a player comes off for non-blood reasons, he should stay off - that way the fourth official is spared a good deal of unnecessary work.
But the crucial one is this: any player coming on should wait for the player coming off to come off before he comes on - that way you could be sure there'd never be 16 players on the pitch.
Referees have the ability to stop the clock for such instances, so there's already a mechanism in place to prevent time-wasting. But with players walking on and off all over the place, the monitoring of replacements has the potential to be severely diluted - as was probably the case with Byrne's re-entry.
The Ospreys had a duty of care to fulfil - they should have ensured Parker was off before Byrne went on. One person should have been able to oversee all of that - both from the Ospreys and from the team of officials. There is no doubt the Ospreys will be punished for their negligence in this matter.
But the result should stand. This was not a case of pre-orchestrated deception, just a mistake in a heated situation, recitified as soon as possible. And did it really make a difference? Leicester might, or might not, have scored some points in a close game. But it's not clear-cut enough to say.
And lest Leicester fans get up in arms and wail and bang their fists in frustration at the unfairness of it all, they should remember Neil Back's wandering hand that might, or might not, have won them the Heineken Cup in 2002. What goes around comes around...