TV View: Rugby and soccer pundits left with little choice but to talk balls and fouls

Rugby is peculiar, really. What other sport would give us an intense debate on whether “a hand through the legs”, as Bernard Jackman described it, ended up in that location purely by accident or whether it was an act of skulduggery and a deliberate assault on an opponent’s bodily integrity?

If you’re old enough, you might recall that Vinnie Jones/Paul Gascoigne incident when the general reaction was “lolololol”, but there were no lols at all from rugby over the allegation that jammed your sports pages last week.

“Just because you’re cited doesn’t mean you’re guilty,” Jackman pointed out on Premier Sports before Munster’s game against the Sharks at Thomond Park on Saturday evening. “There were screenshots all over the place and people assumed because they saw a hand in there that he was guilty, but it was actually part of the clean-out.”

For some of us, of course, Jackman could have been speaking Swahili here, but he was entirely correct in suggesting that just because you’re charged with a crime doesn’t mean you actually committed it. And so it proved, that United Rugby Championship disciplinary committee declaring the alleged offender in the alleged incident not guilty.

“And we’re seeing more and more situations where the player cleaning out misses the clean-out and they go for a hand through the legs,” Jackman also said. And that can “unsettle and destabilise you”.

We could only take his word for this, but you’d imagine he was speaking the truth, Andy Goode nodding beside him as they both explained to Sarah Mulkerrins the gravity of the offence. Which isn’t even illegal in rugby, we learned, so then you’re left wondering what the fuss was all about?

“A hand between the legs never happened in our day, unless you were playing in France,” Jackman said, displaying a small bit of Francophobia, but that allegation prompted Goode, who played in France in his time, to nod violently. “Lads,” he said, “just be normal. Don’t go down there. Don’t touch all our stuff.”

The lads finally got around to talking about the night’s game, but come the end of it, the Munster folk would have been quite happy if they carried on chatting about unsettling and destabilising hands through legs. It was, then, a night to forget against their South Africa visitors.

That pain, though, paled next to what Connacht endured at the hands of Leinster on Friday evening. A 5-50 (50!) loss. And Ian Madigan and Stephen Ferris had both predicted a triumph for the west.

“Connacht ... oh my days,” Ferris sighed come full-time, the fella left wondering if they had got “a little bit above their station the last few weeks”. That suggestion, you’d guess, will be Sellotaped to their dressingroom wall next time out. He didn’t stop there. “That was incompetent, abysmal and humiliating. It was worse watching that than seeing Man United get beat 3-0 at home to Bournemouth. That’s how bad it was.”

That, need it be said, was way too harsh an assessment, as anyone who witnessed that soccer-ball game will attest. Of a slightly superior quality was the clash of Liverpool and Arsenal at Anfield on Sunday, although Sky lost the run of themselves a bit by intimating it was a classic.

Put it this way, there were four shots on target in the entire encounter, just one of them belonging to Liverpool – and that was in added time. No, wait, hold it. “That’s actually been removed by Opta, so not one shot on target from Liverpool in the whole game,” as our host David Jones told us come full-time.

Kai Havertz’s first-half goal decided the game; Gary Neville’s response to said score leaving us a touch flummoxed. “Sometimes you get into November, the clocks go back, and the champions have to turn up when everyone thinks there might be something else happening.” Eh?

No matter, Neville was chiefly preoccupied by the play-acting in the game, notably from Gabriel and Alexis Mac Allister who went down like they’d been hit by Exocet missiles after being lightly tapped. “Get up! Embarrassing!” And when Alexander Isak didn’t throw himself earth-wards after a tug on his shirt in the penalty area? Neville criticised him for not taking a tumble. Sometimes you’d be thinking Neville needs a hand through the legs.