Neale Harvey talks to Nick Mallett about the state of modern rugby
Q&A
Highly respected former South Africa and Italy head coach Nick Mallett, now a Cape Town-based pundit for SuperSport, explains to NEALE HARVEY the radical changes he would make to improve the world game.
First, how has South African rugby coped through the pandemic?
We’ve struggled. The decision to not play in the Rugby Championship was probably a wise one given the fact our players hadn’t been able to train or play and were six weeks to two months behind the other countries. I know Argentina played and performed admirably but they’d been like a club side practicing together beforehand whereas the Springboks would have been drawn together from all over the world. It wouldn’t have been a good idea to play and since then the Super Rugby Unlocked and Currie Cup rugby we have been able to play has shown that our players in South Africa have really been affected by training conditions and the virus. The standard of rugby hasn’t been at the level it should be and there’s been a strange atmosphere with no crowds.
By contrast, what did you make of Super Rugby Aotearoa in New Zealand?
It was excellent. They were able to operate in a completely bio-secure bubble of their own and within that their rugby was very successful. I thought the Aotearoa competition produced fantastic quality rugby and once the referees worked out that they didn’t have to blow at every single breakdown it turned into a fantastic spectacle. One of the main reasons why the Currie Cup has failed to shine is because of the way the rugby laws are written at the moment, which has placed a huge responsibility on World Rugby to get it right. At the moment, certainly within South Africa and Europe, the team that plays without the ball generally wins the game – and surely that wasn’t the point when William Webb Ellis picked up the ball.The aim was to run and pass not bloody kick it all the time, or else he’d have carried on playing soccer.
You sound immensely frustrated by that… why?
There are areas of the game – scrum, driving maul, breakdown and general kicking strategy – that in my view have gone completely in favour of the side who just have a tremendous defence and a very good kicking strategy. If they decide not to play any rugby in the first 60 metres from their goal-line these teams generally win the game, but that can’t make for good viewing. Two years ago, as a coaches’ rep on a World Rugby committee,
I made key observations relating to scrum, maul and kicking that I felt were really important going into the 2019
Rugby World Cup.
But they needed to be seconded and supported by another country and that support was not forthcoming.
What’s your beef with the scrum?
I felt that teams were starting to scrum just for penalties and weren’t using it as a restart, which it is, no different to a kick-off or lineout. It shouldn’t be a means whereby you manipulate it for a penalty, but no teams were attacking off a scrum unless they had a penalty advantage and that just made for reset scrums, collapsed scrums and created very difficult decisions for referees to work out who was at fault. It just made a mess of it all so my proposal was that you should only get a freekick from a scrum offence and you couldn’t ask for a reset scrum because you’ve got the ball and can play. To give the advantage to the side that won the free-kick, instead of going from behind the No.8 the scrum-half could take the tap right where the centre of the scrum was, effectively putting the entire opposition eight offside. That then gives you a 15-on-seven attacking opportunity and in no time we’d see the ball being played around and get really good momentum into games.
How would you deal with the overreliance on close-range mauls?
I cannot understand why you cannot tackle a maul. I’ve never seen anyone getting injured from a collapsed maul. I see people getting injured from high kicks, big hits from one-off runners or centres trying to take it up and set up a midfield ruck, but a static maul that gets sacked poses very little threat. Currently, once the initial contact is made and the ball gets transferred to the back of the maul, how do you stop it? You can flood it with forwards but invariably the referee is looking at the defensive side for side entry, picking up legs or other illegal play and that just encourages teams to kick to the corner all the time until a yellow card comes out or they score a try. What you end up with is a Sumo wrestling fight ten yards from the line which is weighted too heavily in favour of the attacking team. So, why are we not allowed to tackle and try and collapse a maul? If we did, you’d force teams to then peel off, do moves around the side, bring the midfielders and wingers into play and bring in all sorts of magnificent attacking options off momentumbased lineouts that are currently almost redundant. Isn’t that what we’d rather see in the game?
And the endless kicking… how would you limit that?
It’s absolutely critical that we do something about this rash of bloody box-kicks. We’re seeing box-kicks from the No.9 and forwards set up so defences can’t get to him, and even if he is under pressure, the 9 just passes to the 10 who puts up a massive up and under. Most teams won’t play anywhere in their own half now and teams are even kicking on the halfway line to just outside the 22, so the opposition player can’t even mark it. My view is you’ve got to force more accurate kicking, not just aimless kicking in the hope that the opposition make a mistake, so I suggested that if a player catching the ball could mark it anywhere on the field, you could call for a scrum back from where the ball was kicked which would force more intelligent kicking because you’d have to find grass or kick it out. The aimless kicking that we saw in the South Africa v Wales World Cup semi-final, the Autumn Nations Cup in Europe and now in the Currie Cup, that cannot be what we watch rugby for and it’s downright dangerous because you’ve got so many guys competing for balls in the air.
With these law changes I’ve suggested, I believe you’ll balance things out because coaches right now are realising it’s not worth hanging on to the ball because by the third or fourth phase your ball carrier is getting isolated and turned over. Every player now is trained to be an openside flanker, which is a real bone of contention for me. There’s no harm in having a good set-piece, kicking game and some powerful forwards, but it cannot be the be-all and end-all of your attacking strategy. Your outside centre must touch the ball at least once in the game from a passing move!
How disappointed were you with the Autumn Nations Cup up here?
The best moment was Jonny May scoring from his own 22 off a counterattack – I stood up and applauded that for five minutes because I hadn’t seen a try like that for about four years! People think I’m criticising players and coaches but I’m not; I’m criticising the state of the game and the Autumn Nations Cup wasn’t great rugby to watch. If every team is just