Rugby World Cup, South Africa with traffic lights in the stands to guide the kicks

Several years ago in the American zany cult “The Naked Gun”, to mock the curious coded signals that the dugout uses in baseball to communicate with the catcher or pitcher, a luminous signal like the one used was used as the final term of irony. on ships to communicate remotely. In rugby, however, to bring orders to the field, in recent years various players or assistant coaches have disguised themselves as water boys, who are given the opportunity to enter when there is an interruption due to injury. Today, however, South Africa has launched a new and decidedly picturesque method: light signals from the stands.

Signal

—

It happened during the match won 18-3 against Scotland in Marseille in the second match of Pool B at the French Rugby World Cup. After a first error from the pitch, on a new penalty called against the Scots, the TV focused on the Springboks coaches’ box, where Rassie Erasmus (who holds the role of assistant to coach Jacques Nienaber) had Felix Jones light a kind of of a red light lamp pointing towards the pitch: at that point captain Syia Kolisi indicated to the referee that he had chosen to place and Libbok then did the rest, hitting the posts. The scene was then repeated several other times, always to direct the decision that normally falls to the captain on the pitch. That a similar method had been used by the Springboks bench a few weeks ago in the test against Wales in Cardiff, but in that case to indicate the decision to be made on the pitch, not limited to set pieces, but evidently preordained for different situations or areas of play, it was a yellow training “cone”, raised at the right moment by Erasmus on the sidelines. A system evidently designed to offload some responsibility from Libbok, whose percentages in the latest tests had proven dangerously low. The young South African fly-half is not exactly a specialist, but coach Nienaber had defended him resolutely in recent days: “Isn’t he kicking well? It doesn’t matter, he must continue.”

DJ Rassie

—

However, Erasmus in turn is no stranger to interventions of this kind, as when he did it when he entered the field wearing the water boy’s jacket. But he had already used the signal light system in 2006, when he earned the ironic nickname of “Dj Rassie”: in 2006 during the Currie Cup with the Cheetahs, he had lamps with colored lights placed on the roof of the stadium in Bloemfontein that lit up at his command. In fact the old method of holding up cards of various colors had not been successful. “It works better than radios,” he justified himself at the time.