This week sees the start of the final run of Mad Men, a series about a New York advertising agency in a bygone era. The lead character, Don Draper, was this week described by one writer as the very soul of the show: “The facade is always immaculate. It’s only the inside that’s a tumultuous, chaotic, mess.”
The state of rugby union at professional level presents a reasonable facade, but there is turmoil inside, if not chaos. The rise of concussion to the top of the agenda for administrators, which explains the three-week ban handed out recently to the Wasps’ No8 Nathan Hughes for an action lacking in overt intent – the outcome, another head injury for the Northampton and Wales wing George North – determined a punishment that was about being seen to do the right thing at a time when there is still widespread criticism about how the sport deals with serious injuries.
The orthodoxy in professional rugby is that big is beautiful, with the gainline the king. Many players are carrying a weight their bodies were not designed for, more time is spent in the gym than on the training field and some are written off as too small. George Ford was one of them before the Bath outside-half was capped; a not uncommon view was that he would be not be able to play flat because he would be knocked into the next county and he would be a liability in defence.
Modern-day centres have the stature of the second-rows who were playing at the time Mad Men is set in, but Ford has shown, for country and club, that there is still room for guile and deception, sticking up two fingers to those coaches, enemies of the open society, who believe that without power there is no light.
Ford was at it again against Leinster in the European Champions Cup quarter-final on Saturday, discomfiting defenders who are used to ball-carriers coming straight at them by dancing his way out of trouble and finding space where none appeared to have existed. He has become one of the most influential players in Europe because he is not only challenging orthodox thinking but confounding it: what use are bulging biceps when all they have to grasp is air?
Ford can be seen as a throwback to the days when outside-halves were schemers, plotters and dancers who generally had the cleanest jersey at the end of a match, with tackling regarded as, at best, an optional extra and, at worst, an occupational hazard. But he is taking the game forward, not backward, an antidote to the collision-based, gladiatorial contest with its high attritional rate.
One of the qualities that has been diminished in the last 20 years, although not in New Zealand, is the innate understanding of players. Most, when asked after a match what went wrong, will reply that they will have to look at the video before being able to answer the question. Gameplan is everything and those who deviate from it are regarded as dangerous. A few years ago, one Premiership coach could be heard bellowing at his scrum-half who passed the ball a couple of times, ignoring an instruction to kick. The player’s defence later was that he was reacting to what was in front of him rather than the preordained, but he was soon looking for a new club.
There is no one way to play the game. Conditions dictate, so do opponents, and the very best fly-halves are able to react. Ford’s inclination is to run and keep the ball alive and there have been matches this season, England’s defeat in Dublin and Bath’s at Northampton spring to mind, when he was tactically adrift, but it is his second full year of senior rugby and his overall success in an international jersey so far gives succour to those who believe that rugby union is at its most alluring when it combines force and grace.
Bath did lose in Dublin while Saracens, playing rather more conservatively, defeated Racing Métro in Paris to provide the Premiership’s one Champions Cup semi-finalist. But without Ford, who scored one try and set up his side’s other, Leinster’s progress to the last four would have been serene. The home side were in control for most of the match but ended up hanging on because of the capacity of one player to make something out of nothing.
There are others making a similar impact at club level in England: Henry Slade at Exeter, at No10 after playing the first half of the season in midfield; Elliot Daly, a centre at Wasps who runs on the same lines as Jonathan Joseph at Bath; and Danny Cipriani at Sale, helping keep a club that was threatened with relegation two years ago on course for another season in the Champions Cup.
As the days draw out and warm up, conditions should suit Ford and his ilk but, as has been argued before, those running the game should not waste the opportunity of the current laws review and use it to examine ways of creating more space on the field, thwarting the blanket defensive line that breeds collisions.
Banning Nathan Hughes for three weeks for something that did not warrant a red card is a kneejerk response to the spate of concussion cases in the game. There has to be a way for players of Ford’s stature and approach to thrive and for rugby union to be a game for players of all shapes and sizes where areas of specialisation matter. Having learned about defence from rugby league at the start of the professional era, is it not time to look at his teams in that code attack, not afraid of doing so with depth. A flat backline has served mainly to describe the state of the attacking game in union: may Ford herald a new zeitgeist.
• This is an extract taken from the Breakdown, the Guardian’s weekly rugby union email. Sign up here.
