Stop the acting and bring back proper rucking
Game should revert to the old rules as laws on clearing out are being routinely flouted
Take a breakdown from this weekend’s televised matches. Any breakdown will do. Now, freezeframe it second by second and I guarantee you will find at least three players committing penalty offences, according to the strictest interpretation of the laws.
The breakdown is an unholy mess. Ever since real rucking was taken away, it has become a free-for-all. I often hear referees talk about players “painting a picture” at a ruck, which is code for pretending to follow the laws. It is condoned cheating. I have every sympathy for referees in this regard. If every player at the ruck is cheating, then who do you choose to penalise?
And you can understand why the penalised team are angry that they, rather than the equally culpable opposition, are punished. This leads to frustration and incidents such as the Joe Marler clear-out of TJ Ioane. That resulted in a red card and a six-week suspension, which is an utter joke.
The first offender is invariably the tackler. In previous years, as the tackler, you would want to finish on top of the ball-carrier so you could get straight back to your feet and compete for the ball.
However, the laws now state that the tackler must release the ball-carrier and come back through the gate before competing for the ball, which is virtually impossible. So, now it is more of an advantage to be underneath the ball-carrier. This allows you to slow the ball down by holding the ball-carrier’s arm into his body.
Any tackler faces a Catch-22 situation. Once you have tackled the player, you are supposed to instantly release him, but if you release him too quickly, he will just bounce up and claim that he was not held. If you hold on too long, you get pinged for not releasing.
There has to be a happy medium and the best way to do that is to hide your arm underneath the player. The tackler then will not roll away because he claims he is trapped underneath the ruck. The whole time, he will be talking to the referee, claiming he is trying to move. Painting that picture. Again, watch out for it this weekend: their body position will never be horizontal to the ruck, but diagonal or vertical. This stops the players coming in for the clear-out being able to position their feet correctly.
I am convinced that it is impossible to clear out a player who has got over the ball in accordance with the laws. If you want a laugh then look on World Rugby’s website at the image of what they think a ruck looks like and ask yourself when the last time you ever saw this happen.
Either you come off your feet, using your shoulder as Marler did, or you attempt a judo or crocodile roll, which is far more dangerous. This is how Bath’s Taulupe Faletau tore his knee ligaments when he was cleared out by Mathieu Bastareaud. But without these tactics, how do you remove a player who is over the ball?
Then again, a lot of players competing for the ball are apparently defying the laws of gravity if they are genuinely supporting their own body weight. Maro Itoje is a prime example. He plants his feet so far back that he would have to be levitating to support his own body weight.
I have listed four offences that go on at pretty much every ruck, not including the attacking team holding the tackler in the ruck.
So, what is to be done? Simple: bring back rucking. Remove the lottery and allow players to self-police the ruck. Players will quickly learn that there are real consequences to lying on the wrong side of a ruck. There will be some psychopaths who are prepared to take a slice of shoe-pie for trying to slow the ball down, but that is their choice. I know people are squeamish about the use of boots but I believe that it would make the game safer. It would also paint a much clearer picture for the referees.
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