Starting Rotation It’s time to fix nuisance replacements
It’s never too early in the rugby season for a good gripe, right? Heck, this was written before a game of the new Super Rugby Pacific competition had even been played
But with this weekend marking the start of a new footy year in this part of the world – yes, once more intruding on cricket season – this grievance with the game may as well be out there from the off:
It’s time to sort out the nuisance that is rugby replacements.
All credit to the Super Rugby Pacific competition’s committee and referees for their desires to speed up play and enhance the show this year, but they have missed the golden chance to fix the most blatant issue slowing up the game.
Resetting scrums in a timely manner, limiting the input of the TMO and scrapping the captain’s challenge are helpful, but the best thing officials could have done is trial a reduction in the number of reserve players.
Having already granted a dispensation for the red-card replacement rule to be used in the competition this year, World Rugby should have been enlisted to sign off what would have been an even more tangible positive innovation for its spluttering spectacle.
The second halves of rugby games should be the most exciting. But, instead, fans have typically become ‘treated’ to a stop-start snore-fest, where all hope of momentum gets lost thanks to the constant subbing of players in this over-inflated 23-person game.
Eight reserves per team is far too many. In fact, it’s rather ridiculous when you think there’s more than half of another lineup sitting there on the bench, in a professional age where we have frontrowers cranking out bronco times under five minutes.
With such a luxury at their fingertips, coaches have now become wedded to the idea of rotation and pre-planned tactical tweaks. Such is the role fresh legs plays, some have even gone so euphemistic to dub their reserves ‘finishers’, and no doubt players have been brainwashed into thinking they often can’t go a full 80min.
It’s time these coaches were made to work a bit harder on game day. They are the ones paid for having the strategic minds, so let’s see them when they have to weigh up some big bench calls in the heat of the moment.
Last year a group of former British and Irish greats were part of a group who penned an open letter to World Rugby, feeling that substitutions had made the game ‘‘unnecessarily dangerous’’ and calling for just four injury replacements to be allowed instead.
Their point centred around the heavy collisions now in the game and players putting emphasis on muscle over aerobic fitness for the likes of 20min cameos.
World Rugby chairman Sir Bill Beaumont welcomed the idea, though noted evidence of the injury risks was still being gathered via a study by the University of Bath of 2000 topflight games around the world.
Well, forget the science, rugby just badly needs the change to save its entertainment value alone.
In what is a flooded market of options for fans in the modern world, every time-off called by a referee for a tactical sub is another chance for a punter to leave the room, or, shock horror, flick channels, where they may find a free-flowing, easily-watchable game of NRL, which features non-invasive rolling subs.
Rugby’s uniqueness will mean there always has to be some consideration for specialised front-row replacements, while concussion now also plays a big part with HIAs, but that, along with TMO time taken, only accentuates how the game needs to rid the over-use of non-injury subs.
Bringing some fatigue into the game will make it a much truer survival of the fittest, in turn also easily reducing what has become too big a shift towards power players.
There are different ways to tackle the issue – allow one specifically-designed sub stoppage where teams have to ‘use it or lose it’ in terms of making replacements, or a model where the eight reserves could be kept, but with a limit on only, say, four being used, in a similar way to how football operates.
Bringing some fatigue into the game will make it a much truer survival of the fittest.