Year on year growth is the key statistic here. Meanwhile the popularity of rugby as a television product appears to be in decline.
My theory on that is that unless its one of the traditional culturally entrenched sports like soccer in Europe, Baseball, Basketball in the US and even AFL that possess the "social and traditional elements" then you need to be adaptive to your market and audience.
NRL has tried to modify its game to make it more marketable, cricket has / is, AFL is still tinkering ....all to make sure people can watch an entertaining and constant product. Even the WEC (Le mans cars racing) have ordered all commentary be simple and be full of explanations to suit first-time views.
Rugby - The first worrying element is the word "interpretation". Knowing the wife and I don't always see things the same , the chance of agreeing with the "interpretations" of a particular ref is starting on a slippery slope. Then, if you watch a few games like over this weekend you would end up confused and frustrated unless you are rusted on.
As an average punter - The game is stoppy-starty. Apparently we love scrums and lineouts but no one seems keen on them and its rare the players know how to do it and they work. By the look of things it begs the question do the players want to play as they don't seem keen to get on with the game, rather slow it down and only throw in to a line out or scum when ordered to!
The rules seem to change from game to game. An example is over the weekend in one game scrum was going backwards and didn't collapse it was Ok, but in the other its was a penalty as the team going backward wasn't pushing forwards straight......WTF? Í dare not want to try explaining the physics of this to the average punter!
To show you how "silly" the laws are, and how poor the language is in regards to the rules was the hilarious debate we had in the stands at the Brumbies game. At one point the Landers replacement 9 did a behind the back pass that went to a player in front of him. One of the Landers fans behind us said its fine, look at the replay, it was backward out of his hand and "drifted" forwards. Funny thing was its exactly what the replay showed! So was it legal? I mean, it was backwards out of the hand!
The game needs to be made more contemporary without losing the essence of the game, and the rules need to simplified and more black and white.
Simply put, even though i am rusted on the slowness and inconstancy of refereeing is a making it hard to watch. I dare not fast-forward some sports in case i miss something - I am sure rugby is designed to be fast-forwarded!
Even Hugh Cavill admitted to Fast forwarding through the Tahs game in his write up.
