YOU COULD be forgiven for stocking up on canned goods after glancing at the pages of the press last week which offered universal doom and gloom. "What's gone wrong with rugby?" screamed one newspaper while another headline echoed the sentiment, "What's wrong with rugby?" A broadsheet offered its readers "Five ways to get the game up and running", because apparently everyone agrees on one thing, rugby is in crisis.
Kicking predominates and skills are diminishing at the same speed at which the players are growing. Gym monkeys have created our very own planet of the apes and the collisions they produce are resulting in vast numbers being sidelined by catastrophic
injuries. The breakdown is a mess, no one can score tries and the punters are fed up being fed offal masquerading as a dynamic and entertaining sport. I paraphrase of course but it's all there.
They have a point. The international game is dominated by kicking. According to the International Rugby Board's stattos South Africa managed just 43 passes when beating New Zealand in one Tri-Nations match early this year. The All Blacks front row managed three times as many passes as the Springboks' five outside backs. The safety first aspect that brought South Africa success at the World Cup is alive and all too healthy.
The breakdown is a mess but it always will be. When you have large numbers of large bodies acting like crash test dummies the result will never resemble the Bolshoi's best work. Those who complain about there being too much competition at the breakdown have short memories. Not long ago some teams would wind down the clock from the middle of the second half onwards with a succession of pick and drives that were as endless as they were mindless. The balance between the attacking and defending side may need tweaked but too much competition is preferable to none at all.
Tries are proving increasingly hard to come by. The Magners League offers 3.1 per match (compared with 3.9 last season), the Top 14 manages 2.8 (3.3) and the Guinness Premiership is only producing 2.6 (4.1). Defences are currently on top but that is not to say that the situation will stay the same and the risk of losing ball at the breakdown will reward those teams that avoid having them by running into space and off-loading in the tackle.
England in particular have been struggling to nail down a suitable style of rugby and it is probably no coincidence that much of the hullabaloo about negative rugby originates from south of the Border. The timing is all too relevant because these apocalyptic headlines have come hot on the heels of the biggest project to modernise the game that has ever been attempted – the experimental law variations (ELVs). They were supposed to produce a faster, more exciting game with the ball in play more often and matches that were won by tries rather than penalties. They weren't perfect but by and large they did the job.
In the 2008 Tri-Nations, played under the full range of new ELVs, tries exceeded penalties for the first time in seven years and there were fewer penalty goals than at any time in the entire 14-year history of Tri-Nations rugby as free kicks (or scrums) took the place of what had previously been penalty infringements. One year on the more adventurous ELVs had been abandoned and this season the three-tries-per-match average was the lowest in nine years while eight penalty goals per match was the highest in the tournament's history.
Rugby is an inherently conservative sport and it only adopted those ELVs that did not dramatically alter the game while abandoning the radical law changes. Some of the ELVs were not even trialed in the Northern Hemisphere after a hysterical outcry against them led by some of the same pundits who are now moaning about a safety-first kicking fest. It's a delicious irony and one that will cause the IRB delegates to shake their heads in bemusement as they ruminate on the full extent of human frailty over a pint or two of the black stuff.
There may be tweaks, a nudge to the referees' ribs, a change of emphasis here or there but nothing of note will emerge from Dublin because there is a moratorium on any alterations to the laws until after the World Cup in 2011 (except on issues of safety). So the debate will rumble on for another two years, especially if England continue scoring at their current rate of one try every three Tests.
