This week we will be mostly concerning ourselves with plans to expand the Aviva Premiership, law amendments and the lost art of defensive rugby.
War of the roses
Another week, another humiliating blow to the nether regions of the world’s richest union.
Fresh from seeing their national side finish fifth in the Six Nations, the blazers at the helm of the English game are now struggling to compute how their much-vaunted Premiership failed to secure a single berth in the semi-finals of the Champions Cup.
How will the powers-that-be react to this latest setback, one wonders. What stroke of managerial brilliance will ensure the future of English rugby? Who will bring the warring club/country factions to heel and finally plant the red rose on the sunlit uplands of world rugby?
Well, if recent reports are to be believed, there is a plan in the offering – and it’s dead simple. It involved enlarging the Premiership to 14 sides and downsizing the Champions Cup.
Now, regular readers of this column will know that we have nothing but the utmost respect for the English Premiership. Unlike the state-sponsored fare served up in Super Rugby and the Pro14, it is a proper league. Clubs literally live or die by the results that they clock up, and every single game matters.
What’s more, unlike the Top 14, the cycles of the Premiership aren’t governed by boom, bust and sugardaddies: English clubs are marked out by honest grafting, and that attitude runs from boardroom to changing room and through every department betwixt the two.
But we just can’t abide by these calls to give the Premiership even greater primacy. It has inspired within us a sensation we never thought possible: sympathy for the RFU.
Of course, the ambitions of club owners, like Nigel Wray at Saracens, are to applauded. But when they include the soccer-inspired belief that club will soon come before country in the mind of the English rugby fan, you can’t help but conclude that their grasp has finally extended their reach. It’s simply never going to happen, no matter how many fifth-placed finishes England notch up in the coming years.
The RFU produced a natty trailer for the Six Nations that features scenes of English rugby life playing out against a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Law of the Jungle’. A line from that poem is also said to have inspired the Sarries’ famed defensive tactics: ‘The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.’
Perhaps, as they begin to plan for a new dawn, the RFU and her clubs should sit down together and consider why that line is completely lost on them. For until all its parts start to pull in the same direction, the English game will continue to be mired by mediocrity.
In defence of defence
World Rugby should be commended for requesting public feedback on the 11 law amendments that are currently being trialled across the globe, but it hardly smacks of an organisation basking in the certainty of its own decrees.
But that’s to be expected: rugby is a complicated pursuit and even the slightest alteration to a single law is capable of sending rows of dominoes tumbling in unexpected directions.
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We’d be happy if the majority of the amendments pass into proper law, but we weren’t too sure which boxes to tick when it came to the tweaks to Law 15.4 (a tackler must get up before playing the ball and then can only play from their side of the tackle gate) and Law 16 (at least one player on their feet and over the ball makes a ruck).
Whilst we see the benefit of both in terms of making the game faster and easier to understand, we are uneasy about the extend to which defending teams are being disarmed.
And our concerns aren’t just based in notions of fair play and the delicate yin-yang of contest. It is our intense belief that those two tweaks are behind the recent upsurge in injuries sustained across the elite game.
Medical evidence shows (not ‘suggests’) that defenders suffer more injuries than attackers, and we believe that the two amendments in question are forcing defenders to do much more defending.
Worse still, they are making more tackles for far diminished returns. Where once one tackle/ruck could snuff out an attack, now we have whole series of mini tackles/rucks doing very little to thwart attacks being waved on by referees armed with a brief to reward ‘positive’ rugby.
Well that’s our take, anyway! Have your own say here.
Loose Pass is compiled by former Planet Rugby editor Andy Jackson
The post Loose Pass: Premiership, law amendments and defence appeared first on Planet Rugby.