With so much downtime, rugby risks losing its appeal

Stats show the ball is in play in league for about 78 per cent of the 80 minutes; in rugger for only 35 per cent.

Rugby league often has the drop on rugby when it comes to innovations.

For a start, with league, you get more ball for your buck.

I cottoned on to that when I found there was no time to jot notes between phases of play as there was in rugby.

True, they are different games, but league brought in sin bins and video refs first.

But rugby, as in the All Blacks’ tests against the Lions, is cursed with long breaks in play. There were fake injuries, towelling of the ball at lineouts, summit conferences by the British blighters before lineouts, collapsed scrums and excessive referrals to George Ayoub’s box.

A few days later in State of Origin III, the contrast was stark. Virtually the only stoppages were at try time or to go to the NRL Bunker in the Sydney suburb of Eveleigh.

When the Bunker was set up last year, it made 24 video refs redundant.

The Bunker decisions are usually quick – ‘‘got a decision and going to the board’’.

Stats show the ball is in play in league for about 78 per cent of the 80 minutes; in rugger for only 35 per cent. League also now has shot clocks for scrums (35 seconds) and goal-line dropouts (30).

While league doesn’t have lineouts, nor scrums where they actually push, it has fewer penalties and both league and soccer should adopt rugby’s 10-metres march for backchat.

Rugby is bigger on health and safety. All Black Jerome Kaino was yellowed for his laryngeal swinging arm in the third test at Eden Park. In Origin III, the whole shooting box would have been binned.

Most of the roosters interviewed after Origin III had hoarse, gravelly voices from years of being tackled across the throat.

In league they don’t muck about doing autopsies on the field; they put transgressors on report. In the second Lions test, Sonny Bill Williams was not only sent off and the game wrecked because his team played a man short, but then he was given four weeks off despite his crime being unintentional. So he went to Fiji for a holiday.

We have to ask if rugby is not only going soft and slow, but over the top.

Kieran Read was accused by the Limey illiterati of taking out Liam Williams in that controversial offside incident at the end of the third test. He was going for the ball, the way they do, chasing every crosskick on the sixth tackle in league or for every minute in Aussie Rules.

While on this rare league theme, I often wonder how the All Blacks would have thrived with the magnificent Johnathan Thurston running their cutter.

It might have happened. He had a New Zealand father but opted to go the Aussie way. As a youngster he was brilliant, but too small and skinny and none of the NRL clubs would touch him, not even for free. The Bulldogs eventually signed him for match dollars only and still he had to work stacking supermarket shelves.

Unintelligent trekkers

You would expect most trampers to be intelligent humans.

And yet, last week, groups of them set off into the Tararuas and Rimutakas not only in mid-winter, but after the entire country had been told there was an Antarctic weatherbomb coming.

Even if experienced and well equipped, these intelligentsia must have known rivers rise immediately when there are storms, blocking their way out.

And sure enough, when they became overdue, alarm bells rang. That then means putting rescuers at risk, all for the sake of ignoring Dan the flamboyant Man’s weather forecasts on the telly.

Golf club was there first

Around the world, golf courses are built with residential housing being part of the developments.

With that comes the usual activities on a golf course, the hum of mowing the rough, fairways and greens and the occasional wayward golf ball.

So with about 130 houses planned to be built on the former Manawatu Teachers’ College site across from Hokowhitu Lagoon, we hear there are concerns about usual activities of the neighbouring Manawatu Golf Club.

Well, hear this. The golf club has been there since 1895 and if nouveau settlers don’t like it, then don’t buy there or put up a giant fence or wear ear muffs, or duck.

There is only one hole in question anyway, the par-5 15th and much of it is below the level of the property where trees along its length halt the progress of most sliced balls.

Views of green areas usually enhance the appeal and value of housing and many buy golf–side properties for that very reason.

The golf club has long had residential neighbours on the eighth and nine holes. They coexist.

If there’s to be a problem on the old Teachers’ College boundary, then let it stay zoned institutional.