If you like cheating, you have to love British rugby player Tom Williams‘s ploy last week.
Apparently there is a rule in rugby, as in soccer, that once a substitution is made to take a player out of the match, that player can’t return to the game. The exception to this rule is “blood injuries,” in which case a player can come off until the bleeding is stopped and then return to play.
Tom Williams suffered just such a blood injury at a very critical moment of a recent match. I don’t know anything about rugby, but his team was down by a point and they had some sort of drop-kicking specialist on the sidelines and it was the perfect time for him to come in and try a kick that would give Williams’ team the Harlequins the lead.
The trouble began when Williams looked a bit too happy as he left the field considering the large quantities of blood pouring from his mouth. One might have written this off to his being a rugby player, but apparently even rugby players get cross when smashed in the mouth, which led to an investigation. Eventually, television footage revealed that Williams had pulled a capsule of theatrical blood out of his sock and bitten into it in order to produce the faked injury.
A brilliant idea, but alas, in the end not only did Williams get suspended from the league for a year, his substitute also missed the kick and the Harlequins lost the game by a single point.
(More on this story here. Hat tip: Dean Strachan.)
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In fact, when soccer first introduced substitutions into the game in the 1950s, it was restricted to injured players only. It soon turned that teams agreed to fake an injury whenever a substitution was tactically interesting, and then soccer switched to the current system of having a quota of subs: you can use them for tactical or injury reasons, if you use them too early and then get an injury, you play handicapped.
All this interest in rule following is fascinating given rugby’s origins…
In soccer, you can leave the field and be treated for your injury – then return. If your injury is ‘severe’ enough – you will be subbed out (and not allowed to return) – whereas if it is just a minor injury that you can come back from, your team is expected to play down a man until you do in fact return to the pitch.
This penalizes fakers while also not forcing a team to lose a star player in the event that he does actually need to leave the field for some treatment before returning.
Back in the glory days of “Professional Wrestling” the combatants would conceal razor blades in the tape on their wrists to draw blood from their heads. Real blood in a fake sport. What a sad day for the sport of Rugby, one of the toughest games around (I am a former prop so I know).
Tom Williams got BANNED for 12 MONTHS and the club itself got heavily finned. Considering eye gouging only gets 8-15 weeks this shows how they see this type of cheating.
The annoying thing was that the replacement kicker was taken off injured early in the game. If he had made the kick he could have aggravated his injury a great deal causing much more pain and hardship. He would in any event been injured for the final.
Cheating is obviously bad, but sports rules are just weird. If you have a specialist player and want to use that space on the roster, why not let them do their thing?
Why not have reasonable substitutions like in basketball or hockey? Although physically demanding, we’re not talking about triathalons. These games aren’t specifically endurance events.
Baseball is similar with weird substitution rules. Still, it seems to me that as long as the rule was that you couldn’t sub someone back in to artificially move them up the batting order or swap pitchers more than every third batter or something, then even that shouldn’t be a problem.
I guess it’s always the “purists” who resist, despite the rules being pretty arbitrary otherwise. (Hence the whining about the designated hitter, instant replay, etc…)
The ridiculous thing is that for the kicker to return to the game after leaving the pitch he had to be deemed a tactical substitution and not an injury as only tactical subs can return to the game for a blood injury but Nick Evans had his leg heavily strapped and he limped off so it was hardly tactical.
You can see the logic behind the heavy ban they want to get the club and the management on charges so they have incentivised the player to talk by giving him a lenghty ban. The only way they can appeal the severity is with new evidence which means the club has to somehow incriminate itself.
Here is the French commentating on the entire incidence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjuWyKVH3aM
One Final thing. LEINSTER!!!!
Nice post Prof. Levitt. The plot appears too elaborate to have been executed by the player alone. How come he had the capsule in his sock in the first place? The convenient timing of the injury too suggests that there was an agreed signal and it could have been the placement of a substitute player on the touch line. That’s pretty good team work, even if clever by half.