Sharks coach John Plumtree would not have been alone in feeling huge sympathy for Munster after his team edged a dramatic URC quarterfinal.
The contest was decided on a kick-off not unlike the penalty shoot-out that often separates the champions from the also-rans in knock-out soccer matches.
Munster were courageous in staying in the fight for 100 minutes. They were committed and passionate at a venue in a different hemisphere to where they hail from and in front of a crowd that by the end was fiercely partisan.
It was cruel after all that effort to lose by something as arbitrary as a goal-kicking tiebreaker. After all, that way of deciding the game appears out of kilter with what the constant changes to rugby’s laws are striving for — namely greater emphasis on tries and less on kicks.
What would have been galling for Munster is that many of their players will still have memories of their emotional exit from the Champions Cup in the early knockout stages a few years ago at the hands of Toulouse. They lost that tie in similar fashion, and it’s rare for games to be decided that way. So for them it was lightning striking in the same place twice. They were therefore desperately unlucky in that sense.
Except there’s another way of looking at it that will cast them as the opposite of unlucky. Given the log standings decided over a whole season, they were lucky to be given a chance of advancing to the semifinal by way of a shoot-out.
It would have been a travesty had the Sharks, who finished third, gone out after a 100-minute stalemate in a one-off game to a team that finished three places below them.
In that aforementioned Champions Cup game the kickoff decided a knock-out match in a much shorter competition, where the pool phase is so truncated and the opposition the teams play against so varied that there is much less of an argument around the need for consistency to be rewarded than when it happens after an 18-game league season.
The purist part of me, the one that feels what is fair should always take priority, has always loathed the playoff system. If you win the league, surely that means you are the best team and should therefore be awarded the trophy?
Imagine if Liverpool, who won football’s Premier League with something to spare and who decided it in their favour with a month to go were now required to play a series of playoff games to determine their right to be recognised as champions.
If you apply the “first plays eight” rule in the first playoff game, it would have seen Liverpool pitted in a quarterfinal against Brighton, which would be far from a gimme and the hard work of an entire season would go on the line in a one-off.
Yet, while many will share the anathema to having a league decided by playoffs, or a game like the one in Durban decided by a kick-off, the tension and dramatic scenes that greeted the Sharks’ triumph in that kick out provided a cameo example of why both exist.
Professional sport is about entertainment and getting fans engaged so they come back to give you more business. I was at Kings Park and having the Sharks’ entire season hanging on those kicks was spellbinding. Many who were undecided about how much they enjoyed it up to then would have had their minds changed after sampling the atmosphere of that ending to the game.
But while it worked on this one occasion that what was fair came second to selling the game, had justice not been done by the team finishing higher winning, there would have been a different post-match narrative and much justified whingeing.
The superior league performance should be rewarded.
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