Should rugby players pay the penalty?

As Martyn Williams hooked his penalty kick wide to the left of the posts, leaving Leicester to seal victory in the Heineken Cup semi-final on Sunday, fans were left to ponder the strange event they had just witnessed. The subdued reaction from the winning side was more than good sportsmanship – it indicated how the players perceive a system that many think is too arbitrary a way to separate two rugby teams.

The penalty shoot-out is now commonplace in football, but its relative rarity in rugby matches is a result of the game’s elaborate yet easier scoring system as much as anything else – having a number of ways players can score, each with varying amounts of points on offer, makes ties highly unlikely. The ability of specialist kickers to sneak a vital three points from almost anywhere in the opposition’s half also makes a shoot-out a rarity – only last week Steven Myler hit a late drop goal to break the deadlock with Saracens and take Northampton to the European Challenge Cup final.

But simply because the penalty shoot-out in rugby is unusual does not mean it should be forgotten as an issue. The shoot-out’s seemingly arbitrary nature has been accepted in football, perhaps because the scoring system does not so readily provide an accurate reflection of a game’s dominant team; perhaps because almost all players possess the skills to direct a decent shot at goal from the penalty spot. But rugby is different.

With ample opportunities for scoring, a dominant team should – and usually does – emerge. In the rare cases that a tie does occur, even after extra time, it seems bizarre to have the match decided by kicks at goal, a practice that only a handful of players in any team train for. Rugby is a game of both shared skills and specialties, and picking any one of these individual skills over another is unfair and meaningless. Why not set up a mock lineout, with a jumper as a target, and ask every back in the team to throw in like a hooker? While most players, at any level, would probably back themselves to chip over a penalty from the centre of the 22m line, the three misses by professionals in Sunday’s game showed that it is not an ability to be taken for granted.

The shoot-out is certainly a neat and tidy way of deciding a result – it leaves no room for complaints, but in doing so puts cruel amounts of pressure on individuals in what are supposed to be team games. The shoot-out in rugby is probably the worst of all sports, because the result depends purely on each penalty taker, no goalkeeper’s saves to provide even the thinnest veil of comfort. A miss is your miss – only yourself to blame if you put the kick wide.

This situation has been rendered painfully obvious through Martyn Williams. His miss on Sunday, and the resulting emotion, added fuel to the fiery arguments against the shoot-out: how could the cruelty of the system fall upon this man’s shoulders, of all people? Had it been a specialist kicker we would no doubt have felt less sympathy, and perhaps there would have been no debate, but someone had to miss.

Exhilarating and heart-wrenchingly exciting as it may have been, Sunday’s shoot-out demonstrated the injustice of the system. Rugby is exciting enough when games go down to the wire, as England fans in particular need no reminding. The shoot-out is too arbitrary, too unfair, too cruel. Rugby does not need to resort to it - the game itself provides ample opportunity to break a deadlock, as demonstrated by the shoot-out’s rarity.

Jeremy Guscott suggests reducing the number of men on the field to 10 a side for “golden point” extra time after normal added time. As anyone who has played the game will know, by the time such a period came around the fatigue would be so great that a score would be practically inevitable. And while the pain of losing in such a way would probably form an atrocious concoction with the added lactic acid, wouldn’t you prefer that to being the guy who missed the kick?