England’s rugby team aren't the first to be confused by the rules of their own game

The sound of England’s rugby union coach, Eddie Jones, in what his compatriots would call full-on “whinging pom” mode following his team’s laboured Six Nations win over Italy suggested the Australian has acclimatised well. Jones was upset following a match in which England’s players were left bamboozled by the rare but legitimate Italian tactic of players refusing to commit to the breakdown after the tackle. This deliberate stand-offishness meant there were no rucks and no offside line, which left the men in azzurri blue free to block the options of England scrum-half Danny Care when he attempted to pass the ball to a team-mate.

As Jones and the Twickenham crowd became increasingly enraged, Care and his team-mates simply got more confused. It seemed extraordinary that, from a starting XV boasting well over 600 international caps between them, several England players could be heard asking French referee Romain Poite to explain the laws of the sport they play for a living during an actual game. Poite eventually felt compelled to point out to England captain Dylan Hartley that “I am a referee, not a coach”, while England eventually exploited the weaknesses in Italy’s caper. Sadly, the subsequent fallout over the whole palaver has rather overshadowed their win.

While it seems inconceivable that elite athletes might not be familiar with the rules of the sports they play, there seem to be no shortage of such incidents. In 2003, South Africa captain Shaun Pollock was forced to admit his team had gone out of the Cricket World Cup because of a failure to get to grips with the famously complicated Duckworth-Lewis method after a downpour had interrupted play in their match against Sri Lanka.

In a sport where many rules are largely self-imposed, the sight of golfers summoning tournament officials or referees for on-course advice is far from uncommon, and those who counsel the players undergo a three-tier qualification process to qualify for the job. Even then, confusion is unavoidable. During last year’s US Open, Dustin Johnson was forced to play the closing holes of his final round at Oakmont not knowing whether he had earned a stroke penalty for an infringement on the fifth green. In the end, he finished four clear to win his first major, so the penalty he eventually incurred didn’t matter.

Most astonishingly, perhaps, in 2008 former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was only the first of several American football players to make fools of themselves by admitting he didn’t know NFL games could end in a tie. Four years later, following a 24-24 tie between his team and the San Francisco 49ers in 2012, St Louis Rams receiver Danny Amendola famously confessed to an NBC reporter that he had had no idea the game was over. A two-time Super Bowl champion, Amendola is 31 years old and earns a basic salary of $6m (£4.8m) a year. Compared with that, at least, the England rugby team look positively geeky about the rules.