Irish Examiner view: Troubling trends in the land of giants

Mon, 30 Oct, 2023 - 01:00

Very few people will answer in the negative when the question “are you not entertained?” is applied to the 2023 Rugby World Cup. As gladiatorial, don’t-look-away, combats go, this was a tournament full of thunderous encounters, particularly in the latter stages.

South Africa’s outstanding achievement — winning the Webb Ellis trophy four times since Francois Pienaar received it from Nelson Mandela in the Rainbow Nation triumph at Ellis Park in 1995 — confirms their stature as the world’s leading rugby nation. Whatever they put in the biltong or take off the braai has produced a generation of giants capable of winning three successive knockout games. In the most memorable quote of the competition, 18-stone prop forward Ox Nché told us: “Salads don’t win scrums. I want cake.”

Whatever the shouts of “Go Bokke” echoing around the game of rugby, and the inspirational example of Siya Kolisi, now of Racing ’92, we should recognise that there were troubling matters arising from 48 matches played across nine venues over the eight weeks of late summer and early autumn.

Back at the start of September, when hope sprang eternal, we warned that regulatory issues — and in particular the increasingly difficult balance between player safety and red cards for what could either be a reckless tackle or a split-second mis-timing — threatened to seed events with controversy and ill-feeling.

The sport’s solution has been to implement a “bunker review” where time can pass before a yellow card is upgraded to a red while players cool their heels on the sidelines. And, sadly, this is exactly what happened in the final where the All Blacks captain Sam Cane was sent off before 30 minutes were out for a high tackle on Jesse Kriel, never to return.

His counterpart, Kolisi, was shown a yellow card, also for a high tackle, but this was not upgraded. The disparity had to do, apparently, with the way the Springbok “hinged” his legs.

With admirable restraint, New Zealand coach Ian Foster said “it is what it is”, adding with understated effect “the game has got a few issues it has got to sort out”.

One of those is the relentless increase in physical power in the game with its percussive tempo of “hits” and “offloads” and “jackals” and “breakdowns” and “turnovers”. In his book, Concussed: Sport’s Uncomfortable Truth, journalist Sam Peters notes that in 1987 the average weight of the South African national team was 14st 7lb, while at the 2019 final, 24 years into professionalism, the average weight was 16st 12lb. On Saturday night, only three of that country’s impressive roster of juggernaut forwards weighed less than 17 stone.

But there are other challenges ahead. While there have been classic matches in the past two months, there have been too many pointless encounters which emphasise the gulf between top-tier and second-tier nations. The plans for the next world cup in Australia will bring in even more teams.

Covetous eyes are also being cast over the audiences for the sport and it is important that blue riband events remain free to air. Changes to usher in a new world league competition which is due to start from 2026 envisage a grand final between the top team from the northern hemisphere and the southern champions.

While the wind of change is blowing, that is not always to the good. Rugby must proceed with care.

Tragic demise of a comic genius

For a period of our lives, the US sitcom Friends and its ensemble cast were one of those shared experiences that fall under the heading of ‘appointment TV’. As with Neighbours, Happy Days, or EastEnders, we could settle down for cross-cultural escapism. And we did so in very large numbers. At its height, its stars were earning $1m per episode.

Friends proposed to deal with some of the absurdities of centennial life and its secret was in choosing as its main characters six singletons with whom audience segments could identify, some of them romantically: Naïve and wealthy Rachel; uptight Monica; ditzy and insightful Phoebe; good-hearted geek Ross; and the swaggering and struggling actor Joey.

Matthew Perry, who died this weekend after apparently drowning in his hot tub in the famous Los Angeles celebrity millionaire district of Pacific Palisades , was the most intense and most realistically portrayed member of the gang, who lived above the fictional Central Perk coffee shop in New York’s Greenwich Village for 236 episodes between 1994 and 2004. The series was filmed in Burbank, California, although some location shots took place in Manhattan.

Perry’s character, Chandler Bing, was an insecure and laconic statistician and data processor, whose self-doubt echoed Perry’s. These led him to pre-emptively ditch his ideal woman, Julia Roberts, because he feared she would leave him. The scriptwriters had Chandler marry Courtney Cox’s obsessive-compulsive Monica. The fictional couple adopt twins delivered by a surrogate at the end of the series.

The original programme pitch said it was “about sex, love, relationships, careers, a time in your life when everything’s possible”. With Perry, the youngest of the group, there was a melancholy around some of his performances. He had significant alcohol-related issues and a troubling dependence on Vicodin painkillers, which he took to offset the consequences of a jet-ski accident. Subsequent spells of rehab led him to speak openly and vigorously about his addiction. “You can’t have a drug problem for 30 years and then expect to have it solved in 28 days,” he said.

Perry, whose biography was called Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, recounted how he was taking 55 Vicodin pills per day. He had attended 6,000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and undergone stomach surgery on 16 occasions. Fourteen triple vodkas were no longer enough to get him drunk, he observed, and that knowledge provided impetus to his quest for sobriety.

In the poignant, but highly catchy, theme music to the show, the Rembrandts sing “your job’s a joke, you’re broke, you love life’s DOA” before breaking into the chorus, “but I’ll be there for you”, Sadly, it appears that one of the biggest TV stars of this generation had no one there for him in the final moments of a farewell that might have been scripted in Hollywood.

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