Rugby players are a strange breed. They train hard, put themselves through enormous physical pain, sacrifice many comforts in life, and engage in extremely bizarre activities in full view of the general public, all in service to a game which I think we can all agree is utterly meaningless. It takes a special kind of personality to pack into a scrum knowing that what you are about to endure will serve no greater purpose. And yet they do it, and we are glad for their odd motivations and lack of healthy perspective.
But among all the eccentricities of the average rugby player, there is one that puzzles me more than any other. Why is it, do you think, that some rugby players decide, on occasion, to run out onto the field and be really, really bad?
It’s surprising behaviour, isn’t it? Sometimes players go out and they are good. Sometimes they go out and they are bad. Why? The option of being good is right there. I personally think I would take that option every time. Yet so often they take the other option. Perplexing, is it not?
It’s the question that rose to my mind when watching the Waratahs the other day. These guys have gone to a lot of trouble to be professional rugby players, I thought to myself – what has driven them to now, at the very moment when their professional rugby player-ness is on display, have they consciously chosen to play rugby extremely badly? A little perverse, don’t you think? It’s even more bewildering when they change their minds within the course of a single game. On the weekend the Waratahs decided to be good in the first half and utterly horrendous in the second. I’m not saying they didn’t have their reasons…but what were they?
Take Taniela Tupou, for example. Please. Nobody has ever claimed that Tupou is an easy man to fathom, but there are limits to inexplicable mentalities. Taniela Tupou has, on multiple occasions that I can remember, taken the field for various rugby teams, only to then not play very well. Why would he do this? I can find no reference in any news report or player profile to indicate that Tupou has ever spoken publicly about his choices, and that’s a shame, because it would be genuinely fascinating to find out what inspired him to become a bad rugby player. Is it just because he hates Australian rugby, wants it to fail, and wishes only misery on every Australian rugby fan? Entirely possible – a million internet commenters didn’t pick this theory up and run with it for nothing – but difficult to be sure.
Of course, Tupou is not alone at the Tahs. Indeed, most NSW players have taken that – in many ways quite brave – decision to play extremely poorly, and I’m not denying them the right to agency over their lives. I fully support whatever decision any person takes in regards to whether be good or bad at rugby. I just think it’s a bit weird.
Outside the Waratahs there are cases too. Look at Noah Lolesio. I’d love to get inside that lad’s head. To probe the corners of a mind that from early boyhood dreamed of not just playing rugby for Australia, but of playing it woefully. Lolesio cops a lot of flak from fans, but I believe this abuse stems from confusion more than anything else. I don’t think anybody really minds Lolesio being the worst player in history: we’d just love to know why he decided to be the worst player in history, when being the best player in history was, to the untrained eye, the preferable course and the one which Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii went for.
That’s my overriding feeling from week to week these days: confusion. I think it’d be the same with any profession. Think of a person doing a job, for example the guy who collects the trolleys from the Coles carpark (as a freelance writer this is the profession I’m most intimately familiar with). Now, anyone can understand a person deciding to take a job collecting trolleys. But it’s a lot harder to understand why that person, once they’d taken the job, would choose not to collect the trolleys, but instead to douse the trolleys with petrol, set them alight and push them down a hill into a retirement home. If you saw someone doing that, I’m sure you’d be respectful of their decision, but you would definitely wonder why they thought that was a good idea. You’d probably be pretty eager to have a chat with them and find out.
But just as it would be confusing to see that trolley collector set fire to his trolleys, it is confusing to see so many rugby players set fire to their teams, in a figurative sense, each week.
Maybe the fault is with me. Maybe I lack the imagination to comprehend the calculations that go on inside a player’s head. Or maybe it’s that, because I have never been in the inner sanctum of a professional rugby team, I simply don’t realise that players are actually coached to be multi-skilled, to be able to switch between playing well and playing badly at a moment’s notice. I don’t know what the coaches are telling them before the game, and it’s possible I’m being a naive fool by not realising that a major part of running a high performance program nowadays is carefully maintaining the balance between being good at rugby and being bad at rugby, and ensuring both are properly represented over the course of a season.
This would certainly explain a lot about the way rugby is played, and if I’m honest has always been. Even as a boy, I can remember watching the Wallabies with starry eyes, but scratching my head at the fact that sometimes they sucked. At the 1991 World Cup they won the whole thing and seemed to enjoy it, and yet when the 1995 World Cup rolled around they completely changed their strategy and were knocked out in the quarter-finals. I was flummoxed – if you enjoyed winning the World Cup so much why on earth wouldn’t you go and win it again? Were they just bored with the sameness? Do rugby players crave variety? But that can’t be it, because if it was simply a matter of relieving the monotony, the Wallabies of the last 20 years would have chosen to be good sometimes. I simply don’t understand it.
But I am so willing to learn! It’s frustrating to be a semi-professional rugby semi-journalist, and to not have access to all the relevant information in analysing the game. If anyone reading this is a professional rugby player, coach, pundit or just some guy who watches a lot of rugby and has a bunch of stuff that he reckons, please write to me and let me know what I’m missing. I am sure once I understand why the players want to play poorly, I will enjoy them doing so much more.
