Better Rugby Rules

Stephen Jones has been rugby correspondent of The Sunday Times for more than 20 years and is regarded as one of the sport’s most influential commentators.

Source: Stephen Jones debates the biggest issues in rugby union

On Inside Rugby in Australia a few weeks ago, George Smith said half the players like the ELVs and half don’t. A very diplomatic answer but hardly “relatively positive feedback”. There is no real evidence that the players prefer them. JD, Brisbane, Australia

SJ: Every player in Britain I have heard offering an opinion is against the ELVs, even the few that are going to be trialled. There is a great political correctness around now under which everyone is the Southern Hemisphere is frowned upon if they dare to suggest the new laws are not brilliant.

I  am a PE teacher in a west London co-ed school with 1,500 pupils. I have been at the school for eight years and have produced some good, if a little rough around the edges, rugby players who have gone on to play for local senior teams in the Twickenham and Richmond area. However, I cannot and will not continue to coach youth rugby if the law to permit the collapsing of the maul is allowed to go ahead. To do so would be in breach of my “loco parentis” with the pupils in my care. Should an accident occur, or I should say when an accident occurs, it will be me as the teacher and then my school who would be in line for legal proceedings against us. I cannot believe that the IRB are serious in this as a means to improve the game. The maul has been a core element of the game since its inception and should remain so. If other countries (Australia in particular) are struggling to find decent forwards then they should look at the state of their own game instead of trying to run roughshod over ours. The state of the game in the Northern Hemisphere has never been healthier and doesn’t need tampering with. My advice to the IRB and the RFU is to leave well alone before they lose the youth and community rugby that they spent millions on previously trying to improve. Chris Salter, PE teacher at Lampton School, Hounslow

SJ: Well said Chris. And that goes for the scores of people who have written to me who echo your thoughts on the place of the maul in the game, especially the coaches and teachers who feel the same sense of duty. As we now know, the RFU has bravely decided that enough is enough and will not allow the maul experiment in under-19 rugby. Long may Lampton rugby thrive.

When I was young it was perfectly legal to collapse a maul. The powers that be then came along and said “do this no more for it is very dangerous”. The reason given was that the number of maul-related injuries was increasing each season. Fitness levels were not as they are now, nor were the mauling techniques as sophisticated. The IRB will now be liable to litigation under duty of care as it can be shown that they are reversing a law that was introduced to reduce the known risk of injury. So how can the new law be defended? Peter Brown, Bridgend

SJ: Agreed Peter.

FAINT PRAISE FOR THE IRB

Partly hidden away last week was the first sign of a climb-down by the International Rugby Board that they are finally acknowledging the sheer power of the opposition to the grisly ELVs.

It’s about time. Every report suggests that political correctness is now so rampant in the Southern Hemisphere that it is simply not done to express yourself in opposition – although as George Smith of Australia said in the New Zealand Herald recently, only around half the players believe that the experiments are any good.

In Britain, from top to bottom and at any level, from coaches of junior rugby all the way up to the top players and top coaches, the opposition is total and so is the sense of dismay that just a fraction of the full raft of experiments have sneaked their way in to the next European season.

However, there is good news. Last week, the IRB issued a directive to referees. It asked them to remember the laws. It insisted, for example, that referees are hard on players in rucks and at the breakdown, that players on the team in possession are refereed strictly, so that they do not simply flop over the ball to seal it off.

In other words, the IRB have belatedly realised that one of the major problems in the game is that their own laws are being ignored by their own referees. This is new. Speaking on the record to me only six weeks ago, Paddy O’Brien, the IRB referees manager, was clearly posing to me only a rhetorical question when he asked if I wanted the laws to be refereed strictly. “I can tell you that it will cause two years of chaos if we suddenly go back to the letter of the law at the breakdown,” he told me.

That is exactly what the IRB are now going to do, and they are completely correct. You see, their only other strategy to try to avoid the mess at the breakdown was an ELV cheats’ charter in which they basically abandoned almost all of the laws and sanctions, and set loose an utterly nonsensical tap-and-go fiesta of rubbish in which almost every offence was liable only to a free kick.

If they are really good enough and strong enough to apply the existing laws at the breakdown, we will see the re-emergence of the ruck, we will see the game speeding up, we will see the end of that horrible succession of mini-rucks through which teams run down the clock.

And we will see the end of the need for ELVs – as if there was any question in the first place that they were unnecessary. At last, we can give full marks to the IRB.

My Comments: I am not a great fan of Jones, but his opinion was 100% correct about the All Blacks prior to RWC 2007, and we didn’t listen. So let him have his voice.