Better Rugby Rules

 John O’Neill

Source: Numbers game will bar code – Jacquelin Magnay

AUSTRALIAN Rugby Union boss John O’Neill has given a blunt warning that one of the football codes might not survive. He reckons it will come down to the survival of rugby union or rugby league, not both.

O’Neill said yesterday that league and union need to protect their own backyards as much as concentrate on interstate and overseas expansion because of the crowded marketplace and aggressive pursuit of new territories by the AFL and soccer.

” I mean, competition is about survival. Rugby league and rugby union actually are the two games that are very similar. Rugby league is celebrating 100 years of its existence. I’m not talking about reunification of the two games, but in this battle for hearts and minds, there is a risk that one of us may slip off the list.

“I don’t intend for it to be rugby union, I’m not intending for it to be rugby league. But I think we know there is a gorilla in the room called AFL and we know, I know, that football is the big mover and shaker – and therefore, I think rugby league and rugby union are going to have to fight very hard to maintain our positions, particularly in the eastern states.”

My Comments:  If you have ever wondered why the ARU is blindly supportive of ELV rugby, the above desperation comments from John O’Neill must seal it for you. I am not against the ELVs, I like them with changes (see my page called My ELV Amendments ). The ELVs is the ARUs great white hope for competing with NRL and ARL, and survival.

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.

AFL players getting friendly ! This must be illegal.

Yeah, Robbie don’t care, he got $AUD in the bank !

Source: Not beautiful, but this proved an intense and absorbing game – George Chuter

Not the most beautiful and free-flowing of games, but these big finals rarely are. There’s not much arguing with the excitement it generated, though, another intensely fought contest between two of Europe’s best sides. I fancied Munster beforehand, but by half time I was beginning to think Toulouse would swing it.

They needed to score early in the second half, which they did, a classic French try. It makes you wonder why they don’t always play that way. French sides in general seem to have tempered their instinct for running rugby with something more practical, but it’s when they cut loose, as Cedric Heymans did for their try in the second half, that you think they might be impossible to live with.

We at Leicester went down to Toulouse earlier on in the competition for one of our pool games, and they played a similar sort of way, taking us on up front. They did a good job, as it turned out, and we lost. It’s a harsh place to go when the crowd are up and they get those bands playing.

But their fans aren’t great at travelling, and maybe that’s why the French teams have a reputation for the same. The crowd in the Millennium Stadium were overwhelmingly Irish. But the myth of the French travelling badly has been exploded lately, not least by Toulouse, who have won this title three times, and each one has been on foreign soil.

They could have won here again – it was close enough to have been a bit of a lottery – but Munster’s management of the game was superior come the end.

Both sides may have been helped by the pools they were in. A bit like the World Cup, the finalists had each emerged from a testing pool. Australia were a good example there – they hadn’t had a proper contest and the way Canada challenged them physically in their last pool game was what tipped us off that there may be a weakness if we went for them.

Similarly, if you’re in one of the Heineken Cup’s weaker pools, it can lead to the development of bad habits as you cruise past teams in a way that is unrealistic come crunch time. It was obvious from yesterday’s game that this did not apply to either side.

I don’t know if it is anything to do with the World Cup, but you could argue that this year’s Heineken Cup has been a bit cagier than previous events, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing. No one really wants to see teams canter off into the distance without earning their right to victory. You want to see contests, and you want to see imperfections and mistakes as people deal with the pressure.

Casual fans may not have seen too much to recommend yesterday, but, as anyone who has watched and played the game for a long time would, I found it absorbing. It’s a sensitive matter these days with the Experimental Law Variations due to come in next season, introduced to make the game more marketable. The game is struggling for exposure in Australia, for example, where rugby union comes third or fourth in the nation’s sporting interests.

But yesterday we saw a game that threw up a lot of the things that make our game different from Aussie rules or rugby league – the intricacies of the set piece and at the breakdown, the ruck and the maul. These could go south if the laws change.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories about it being a directive dreamt up by the Australians, and I have no idea if that is true. But, up here, the game has never been in better shape, not only in terms of the entertainment but in terms of the numbers watching it. So the obvious thing to ask is, why change it?

But it’s happening, and it is a challenge for us up here to make something of it. There will be a lot of confusion as players and referees get used to it, but, who knows, if it all pans out as it says on the tin, it could end up making things more exciting. Then again, we don’t have the mild winters they have in Australia, and short of playing with a beach ball no law changes are going to do anything about having to take on the English winter. But if Leicester can be holding the Heineken Cup this time next year after a 58-43 win in the final I won’t care what laws we were playing under.

Leicester hooker George Chuter has played 21 times for England

And there is nothing wrong with this type of game either, it seams the rugby world is split and for good reason. Please read Foundation posts found under pages, thanks.