Three ways to fix rugby once it kicks off again
Game can be better than ever with a few rule tweaks
Changes to the structure of the season, new ways to finance the sport and making TV deals are all vital to make sure rugby succeeds when it returns. But all the framework in the world won’t help if ways are not found to cut the number of games that are a cross between 1960s rugby league and sumo wrestling.
In 1965, as a country kid starting a new job at the New Zealand Herald, one of the attractions of moving to Auckland was seeing a game of league for the first time.
League and union fans at that time usually shared a mutual contempt. League was “state house rugby” if you were a union follower. League people called rugby “kick and clap”.
In the mid-1960s, league allowed teams to play the ball an unlimited number of times, so two lines of players with battered noses and scarred eyebrows (league then allowed head shots that would make
MMA brawls look tame) smashed endlessly into each other.
Have a look at some of the rugby replays filling time on Sky Sport. In 21st century rugby, they don’t call it a play the ball, they call it a breakdown. But the result is often the same as in old school league; endless breakdowns, where commentators note “that’s the 15th phase and they haven’t made any ground at all”.
In 1967, league introduced a four tackle rule, which went to six tackles in 1972. In the unlimited tackle days, there were still flashes of brilliance.
Roger Bailey, a genius of the game who played centre for Ponsonby and the Kiwis, would stroll around the paddock looking almost bored until he would suddenly take a step, feint as if to run, and then fire as good as pass as any oval ball player in the world has ever thrown to his wing, who would miraculously find himself in open space. In a flash, the sodden swamp that was mid-winter Carlaw Park had been transformed into something as thrilling as a high wire act at Cirque du Soleil.
Rugby players such as Beauden Barrett, Rieko Ioane and Sevu Reece have a lot of that Bailey ability to electrify a game. To make sure fans come back when it’s again safe for crowds to gather, the trick for rugby is surely to make sure there’s more running, stepping, dodging, weaving and try-scoring than large units lumbering into each other to set up another one-off runner.
How could that be done? Here are three possibilities.
1 Enforce the offside line at breakdowns
To paraphrase Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction, time to get medieval on those defenders who creep forward at the breakdown.
Setting a 5m or 10m gap behind the last foot of a defending team at the breakdown would be even better, but could quickly turn into chaos. League struggles to always maintain the gap behind the play the ball, and that’s a much more static situation.
In rugby, a new breakdown can be set up every two or three seconds, so policing, say, a 5m offside line in real time could be a total nightmare. But it’d be a great idea to just police the current rules.
How far you’d go with that is a big question. World Rugby vicepresident Agustin Pichot has suggested the sport go hi-tech and use a drone to check on lines.
“Let’s use the technology,” he said last year, “and that will soon sort it. Within five games, players will know that Hawkeye is watching them and they will stay back. That is my view.”
It does feel a step a bit too far into the future but let’s remember there was a time when rugby officials swore video referees would be the end of the world as we know it.
In 1998, I argued the idea on the Holmes show on TVNZ with David Moffett, then the New Zealand Rugby Union chief executive. Yes, there are times when all of us could do without endless replays of a possible try, but basically I’d stick with my feelings in ’98. If you need technology to get things right, then use it.
2 Speed up setting the scrum
It was imperative that there were changes to make setting a scrum safer. For a terrible period in the 1980s, young players were suffering critical injuries.
At lower levels, where spectators are not being charged to watch, taking all the time in the world to keep players safe is fine.
But one former All Black recently suggested to me that at the highest
levels, the time may have come to set a time limit for setting the scrum, just as there is for taking a kick at goal.
Setting a scrum in Super Rugby or tests currently averages a minute. Cutting that to 30 seconds would at least be a push in the right direction.
Surely people who have propped at the highest level could work out a way to restart the game without endless resets that can (I’ve timed them) take up to three minutes.
3
Stop tactical substitutions
In 1996, All Blacks coach John Hart was rightly outraged when in the first test of a historic series win, giant Springboks prop Os du Randt said he was “gatvol”, which roughly translates to “stuffed” in English, and left the field. Du Randt wasn’t injured, which was then the only reason for a replacement to be allowed. But what was in fact a tactical substitution followed, and Springboks prop Dawie Theron, who wasn’t “gatvol”, finished the game in du Randt’s place.
At the end of that year, the IRB changed the substitution laws.
Clever coaches make good use of subs, and while in some cases players are brought on who add to the attacking prowess of the team (think Beauden Barrett at the 2015 World Cup), the fresh legs usually add to the defensive strengths.
It sounds almost callous but fatigued players just might allow more opportunities to attack and score tries in the last 20 minutes. And the more that happens, the more fans will continue to enjoy the game.