Firstly, I realise that Mark Boucher is basically being accused of having had a role, and depending on who you ask, a leading role, in making players of colour uncomfortable for a rather large portion of his career, while Ollie Robinson sent out a selection of anonymous tweets as a teenager, but reading and watching the fall out of the Paul Adams SJN testimony and Mark Boucher's response to it had me wondering about the relationship between the two, if any.
Firstly, Boucher. I must admit that I've never been a 21-year old with a racial superiority complex drilled into me from a young age, so it could be that this is simply a case of not understanding the other side by virtue of not having a commonality. But I have been a young man, and Lord knows that I've said and/or thought some very stupid things in my time, so I'm willing to accept Boucher no longer holds the "naive" views on race and racial relations he once held. By his own acknowledgement, it was only during the workshops and team discussions during the Black Lives Matter protests that he began to really understand the entire picture of racial relations (which is shocking to be honest, given the fact that he was made the coach of the most culturally diverse national team in the country). But that's where his "walk of atonement" falls apart. Its been over a year since those discussions were held. Is the idea really that in that year, he didn't realise that he had in previous parts of his life been the bad guy in someone's story? He didn't realise during some of these workshops that these stories sounded awfully similar to things he'd been a part of? He basically had a year to rack his brain and think of the time him and his friend would literally commit a hate crime every fines meeting, and he couldn't? He couldn't call Paul and say, "listen, I've been speaking to some of the guys and I realise what we did was rotten"? I can't see how an apology now, made only after he's been named as one of the main instigators in a long line of poor
Which brings me to Ollie Robinson. Of course, the anonymity of the Internet means in reality his actions were a lot less harmful than Bouch's, but nonetheless, he too seems to be a case where apparently apologising for something you've never shown contrition for after the fact seems to be enough for everyone to move on. I'm not calling for Ollie to be tarred and feathered by the general public - although when combined with his sorry results, I can't see how CSA can
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