Wales coach Warren Gatland has admitted he considered making one of his players fake an injury against France in the hope of turning the game.
With one prop, Adam Jones, already gone through injury, Gatland and his back-room team discussed the possibility of getting one of their other props to pretend to be injured, ensuring that referee Alain Rolland would have to make all the remaining scrums of the World Cup semi-final uncontested.
“We’d already lost Adam Jones, and we discussed in the [coaches] box whether we would fake an injury to one of our props and go to uncontested scrums.
“But morally, I made the decision it wasn’t the right thing to do.
“We could easily have done that in the first 25-30 minutes, but in the spirit of the game, in the spirit of a World Cup semi-final, I didn’t think that was the fairest or the right thing.”
Gatland had already seen his captain, Sam Warburton, dismissed by that point and the uncontested scrums would have lessened the impact of the absence of the flanker.
Gatland’s comments are interesting in that he points to a big hole in the rules of the game, one that can be exploited by coaches if they feel like it. It is also intriguing that he admitted to thinking about cheating.
The most famous incident of cheating in rugby was of course the farcical ‘Bloodgate’ scandal involving Harlequins player Tom Williams against Leinster in 2009. That was so badly done that it was obviously going to get caught but if Gatland had pulled out Gethin Jenkins or Paul James it is unlikely we would ever have known.
In truth, it wasn’t the scrum that lost Wales the game 9-8 but the atrocious kicking of both James Hook and Stephen Jones. Whether the IRB decide to take action against Gatland for his comments remains to be seen but if they do it will only heighten the sense of injustice in Wales, who are still fuming over Warburton’s red card.
Warburton’s deserved red card.
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