The Sunday Times January 14, 2007


The future of rugby?
Stephen Jones

The IRB is trialling a radical set of rules intended to make life easier for referees, but will rugby benefit from the changes?


Last season, the Cats scored a superb try in a Super 14 game at Ellis Park, Johannesburg. Paddy O’Brien, the referees manager for the International Rugby Board, still has it on DVD. “It came after about one minute 40 seconds of play,” explains O’Brien. “The move began, there was a tackle, it continued though a phase, there was another tackle, another phase and then the try. Really good. Around 50,000 spectators applauded.”
Rugby is always evolving, through periods when it can be cynical, or mediocre, or splendid, or — as you will know if you saw Rupeni Caucaunibuca playing for Agen against Gloucester on Friday — even sublime. At present, it is also much loved and successful. Crowds are booming.



So why is profound change to the laws of the game in the air? Why, last weekend in Scotland, did the most far-reaching trial period for revolutionary, even frightening, new laws kick off? The Scottish Hydro Electric Super Cup (there is no law demanding snappy titles for new events) involving the top Scotland clubs is being played entirely under what the IRB are calling Experimental Law Variations (ELVs). Three games have already taken place.

Revolutionary is the world. Take just one of rugby’s most famous laws barring you from handling the ball in the ruck. Now, under the ELVs, you can. Whatever next? Collapsing the maul? Yep. Under the ELVs, you can do that, too. Indeed, swathes of penalty offences have been swept away. Some will be reduced to free kicks.

The ELVs have been put together by the IRB’s law project group, thrashed out in debate and also on the field, with the various house teams at South Africa’s famous Stellenbosch University acting as a laboratory.

Now that the ELVs are being trialled in their entirety in the Super Cup, others will be trialled individually in different events in different parts of the world, at different standards and age groups, and in different weather. The IRB are quick to point out that the experiments are in their infancy. “If they don’t work, they won’t be incorporated,” says the IRB’s Greg Thomas. But it is hard to believe that none will become law.

So what was so bad about rugby? The problem is illustrated when you study O’Brien’s DVD. “When you look at the try you can see 14 penalisable offences before the touchdown,” O’Brien says. “If I showed it to my 12 top refs, about seven would say they would have allowed the try and about five would not have. Of those five, all would probably have blown for different offences.”

The try was scored, therefore, through decent play — and refereeing subjectivity. Rugby has become fiendishly difficult to referee, and therefore to fully understand, for old as well as new followers. There are so many laws, so much that can be whistled up.

There are other laws that are simply no longer applied. “The law book is past it. We keep on adding law, we never take any away. What about the law that you are not supposed to ruck with your head lower than your hips? It hasn’t been refereed for years,” O’Brien says. “So let’s stop paying lip-service. Let’s adapt the laws to the game that we’ve got, make it easier for referees, especially at the breakdown, and for players and followers to understand.”

Enter the ELVs. They are not, primarily, simply intended to speed up the game or provide better rugby (whatever that is — most attempts to ‘improve’ rugby usually end up sacrificing its strengths and confrontations and peculiarities on an altar of froth), although that would also be a happy by-product. But they are intended to cut down on subjectivity, to stop the referee deciding games.


THE RADICAL nature of these laws can be judged by the fact that in the early experiments at Stellenbosch University, there were no rules at the breakdown. None. “Then we realised we had to have some rules,” says O’Brien. “But at present, the ref has about 30 things to keep an eye on.”

In the ELVs, the only offences drawing a full penalty at the breakdown are offside, holding on to the ball and failing to enter through the gate (from the back of the ruck or maul). The rest is, in one sense, a free-for-all, although deliberately offending or dangerous play are still full penalties. Scrabbling with your hands is fine — as long as you are still on your feet. Sacrilege is now allowed.

Under the ELVs, you can now pull down the driving maul (the IRB’s Medical Advisory Committee has concluded, perhaps surprisingly, that this is not dangerous). This measure intends to remove all the anomalies from the maul, where the referee at present is transfixed with the defending team but has to ignore the illegalities and effective obstruction of the team with the ball, the ball-carrier positioned in a phalanx of his own men.

In the lineout, so that the referee no longer has to fret that both teams have the correct numbers, you can put in however many players you want — two, 10, 13, whatever. To help the referee further, the touch judges (henceforth known as flag judges) can indicate offside to the referee by holding his flag out, pointed towards the offending side.

There is more, inclining towards the freeing up of the game. At the scrum, the offside line is moved back five metres — the defence can no longer hang on the rear feet line but have to start five metres back. The quick throw-in no longer has to be straight, so if the lineout is not formed you can whizz the ball back to your full-back, say, to start a counter-attack. The corner flag is moved back two metres. At present, if you touch the flag in your scoring dive, any score is disallowed.

Now, provided you do not ground any part of your body over the sideline, you can score a fair try when before, you would have wiped the flag out completely. The flag is no longer at the corner.

The matches in Scotland last weekend were fast and furious, as the DVD of the Currie-Melrose game shows. Personally, and allowing for the fact that Currie, the proud league champions, were not at their most intense, I found it slightly frothy, with a complete absence of mauls.

The players enjoyed the games. So did the referees. Rob Dickson, the fine Scottish official who took charge of the Glasgow Hawks-Boroughmuir game, says: “Most of the experience was very positive. Mauling will be different but the tackle area tended to be dynamic, the ball was available quickly because the team which took it in knew that the opposition might get their hands on it so moved smartly.

“It was far easier managing the breakdown, no need to shout at the players all the time. The 5m offside law freed up so much more for the attacking team. I know there is a long way to go but, frankly, I enjoyed it.”


THE IRB will continue to monitor. I admire their energy and resolution. I agree that refereeing whim is too high in the mix, and see the same anomalies — the mess at the breakdown and the maul (though the maul must not die, it ties up defenders), the blind eyes to too many laws. But I cannot suppress an unease. It is less than four years since Syd Millar, the IRB chairman and a laws expert, said: “Laws should be left to evolve, we shouldn’t go out and force them.”

O’Brien is several cuts above the IRB lawmen of old, of course, and his laws panel includes distinguished men, such as Rod Macqueen, the Australian World Cup coach of 1999. But it also, without naming names, contains too many dreamers and not enough Anglo-Saxon scrummagers.

And if you do come up with radical new law experiments, where is the trial that really works? We will only really know if new laws are any good after two years of real, bloody action from Currie at top pace; and then only when the All Blacks and Richie McCaw have squeezed the new laws dry and when results-conscious English professionals have sneaked around and found the loopholes. But then, it might be too late to change back.

It would be lovely if rugby was easier to understand. But it is not a game that will ever be transparent. Is the discomfiture of the referees really reason to make radical changes? Perhaps it is. Perhaps not.

People have a love affair with rugby, and new people are beginning new love affairs with it, precisely because you have to endure a fog of frustration and even confusion before you emerge into the sunlight of its glories and watch Rupeni run.

And I will also go to my grave in the utter conviction that rugby followers revel in its confrontation and quirks and its peculiar rhythm, and have a distaste for movement created artificially, just so that we can boast about how long the ball was in play. Evolution, I feel, is better than ELVs.

However, I am not writing off the whole experiment. I will admit that the spectacle of hands in the ruck, of crashing mauls, lightning recycling and faster rugby, has both an intrinsic fascination and, just possibly, the prospect of genuine improvement.

This article was posted on 14-Jan-2007, 17:07 by Hugh Barrow.