Edinburgh head coach Richard Cockerill stopped well short of accusing Tadgh Beirne of cheating yesterday, but he suggested that the ease with which the Munster lock was brought to the ground, resulting in the penalty that led to their Champions Cup quarter-final winning try has worrying implications for the sport.
Beirne was floored by an innocuous looking shoulder charge from Edinburgh prop and while Cockerill made it clear that he felt his player had blundered and that officials were entitled to make the decision they did, he felt there was a striking contrast between Berne’s reaction and that of Edinburgh’s relatively lightweight scrum-half Henry Pyrgos when he was taken out off the ball to open up the opportunity for the Irish province’s other try.
“It has been well documented you don’t want guys diving and making a fuss of things because you are going to get it right across the game,” Cockerill observed pointedly, in expressing his unhappiness with the behaviour of both players involved in the incident which happened after a late challenge on one of Schoeman’s team-mates that had initially seen a kickable penalty awarded to Edinburgh.
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“There is a bump of shoulders. There is a player who is 16 st and 18 stone or so. It does not look good for Beirne from that point of view,” said the coach.
“Pierre could have avoided it. He didn’t need to get involved in it. However, the bigger picture is do we encourage all the players to lie on the floor and make a meal of it so when a player is injured the TMO gets asked to have a look at it.
“It was a huge point in the game. We kick that goal it is 16-10 and it is different. Pierre must learn that lesson and we can defend better from the ensuing line out, but also the officials need to decide what they want to reward. Henry Pyrgos lies on the floor after being dumped on the back of his neck in that tackle off the ball by Conor Murray.
“Then maybe I ask Henry to lie on the floor and pretend to be injured. We go to the TMO (television replay official) and maybe it is not a try. Where does rugby end up? It ends up down a different route. We can all do it. Maybe that is the way forward in any big game. If you get slightly hit lie on the floor, pretend you are injured and then you bring the TMO in and you have different actions.”
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If so, however, he believes the sport would lose something valuable in terms of ethos.
“It depends what you call gamesmanship? Gamesmanship is competing for the ball on the edge of offside. Is pretending to be injured gamesmanship like diving in football? Is that gamesmanship? Do you want it in the game or not?” he asked.
When it was pointed out that football managers have been known to make a distinction between telling players to dive and telling them to make sure they go down in the penalty box if they feel contact, he reckoned such thinking was incompatible with rugby.
“I don’t Henry lying on the floor pretending to be injured, because where do we end up with it? We end up on a slippery slope. I would prefer our players to stand up and be robust and get on with it,” he said.
“Without sounding too old. If that happened 15 years ago you would be embarrassed wouldn’t you? Even your own team mates would be laughing at you telling you to get up.
“It is happening all the time now. Because of the way the high tackle is refereed anybody who gets touched around there they make more of a fuss than they should sometimes.
“If you are injured stay down. I get it. I completely understand that. If you are not get up and get on with the game. The respect for the game starts to fall away if you don’t.”
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