It is hard to deceive 13 adults at once. It is not impossible either; practise your sleight of hand sufficiently, or pick the right bus at the right febrile political moment and you can achieve surprising results. Generally speaking, however, it is tough. So imagine how Niki Goneva must have felt as he cruised unmolested through a bewildered Saracens team to score what he believed was an amazingly sneaky try.
Goneva, the Newcastle wing and Premiership player of last season, ran the length of Kingston Park on Sunday after having faked out his entire opposition. On claiming a failed Owen Farrell drop-goal in his own area, the Fijian made as if he was touching down for a restart. The twist was that Goneva had actually touched the ball on his toe instead. Technically, the ball was still live and Goneva took advantage by sprinting off into the Saracens end before anyone had a clue what was going on.
Not everyone missed the trick. In the BT Sport commentary box the former England international Ugo Monye was over the moon. “I always dreamed of this,” he trilled. “I always dreamed of faking and putting the ball down and looking at the ref, I used to do it in training all the time.” Monye had spotted a piece of elite level gamesmanship and was delighted. Sadly for him the referee, Ian Tempest, had not done the same. While Goneva was charging away, Tempest blew his whistle for the drop-out and the try was chalked off.
The Falcons’ director of rugby, Dean Richards, insisted it should have been allowed and would have been had Goneva’s action been referred to the TMO. For Saracens Mark McCall argued Goneva made it as far as he did only because the short-handed champions (Alex Goode and Nick Tomkins having been sent to the sin bin) had heard the whistle and stopped playing. Both were perfectly legitimate positions. But by then the waters had been muddied, as Tempest claimed he had seen what Goneva had done and had actually judged the action to be a “game value offence”.
This phrase appears to have been Tempest’s own coinage, though everyone knows what he means. Section 26 of Law 9 in the Rugby Union code states: “A player must not do anything that is against the spirit of good sportsmanship.”
"We want people to creative in rugby and try and find the edge. Brilliant play."@ugomonye loves the thinking from Vereniki Goneva despite Ian Tempest disagreeing. pic.twitter.com/l8MEAUNdfV
— Rugby on BT Sport (@btsportrugby) September 2, 2018
But Tempest’s ruling does beg a good question: is deception always bad sportsmanship?
There are obviously deceptive acts that few would deem acceptable. Doping is right out the window. The same goes for secretly deflating a ball so that it becomes easier to catch. Or – and this is so bad that no one (especially anybody already mentioned in this article) would even think to try it – encouraging players to stick blood capsules in their mouths so as to fake injury in order to effect tactical substitutions. But what about simply playing sneaky?
Recent actions by a number of sporting bodies show where they think the line should be drawn. Last year MCC decreed that “false fielding” would be banned from cricket. This was the act of pretending to have successfully fielded a ball (when, in fact, you had not) in order to stop a batsman from leaving his crease to attempt a run.
In football, meanwhile, there were revisions to the rules on penalty-taking in 2016 which meant anyone who feinted before taking the kick would be booked. People who simply stuttered in their run-up were fine, however.
In tennis one comparative example would be the under-arm serve. Crazy as it may seem, the preferred method of serving for punters who have taken up the game only because they moved to a nice village and there was nothing else to do, is actually quite disarming at the professional level. It comes short and leaves an opponent, who will normally be yards behind the baseline, scrambling to reach the ball. It is not illegal in the laws of the game and Michael Chang used this technique successfully against Ivan Lendl in the 1989 French Open. A more infamous example occurred a decade later when, at the same venue, Martina Hingis pulled the trick on Steffi Graf.
Watching the YouTube clip of the incident is an instructive experience. When the 18-year-old Hingis wins the point there are no “oohs” of surprise or “la las” appreciating her audacity, as there were for Chang. There are just boos, rounds and rounds of them, to the extent that Hingis first blushes with embarrassment, then looks appalled and, finally, narrows her eyes in renewed resolve like the champion she would go on to be.
The Hingis serve acts as a reminder that sportsmanship is often in the eye of the beholder (and that gender might play a part, too). Just as Monye delighted in Goneva’s play, some tennis aficionados say the under-arm serve is underrated and should be used more often to undermine defensive baseline play. There can be similar division over simulation in football. No one likes Neymar rolling around but it is also clear that being able to draw a foul and capitalise on it is not only valuable to the team but an actual technical skill.
In these roiling times it is perhaps consoling to know that ‘game value offences’ are still even a consideration. But the fact of highly trained, highly competitive athletes putting one over their opponents is time-honoured as well. There is difficulty in knowing where the line between audacity and cheating actually lies but, when it feels right, deception can be just as glorious a part of sport as any other.
