We’re all used to World Rugby looking at the state of the game and coming out with a raft of new laws, most of which many of us think are a waste of time and effort, or miss the point.
This year’s changes
This year’s changes came into effect yesterday. You can read the full text here but they’ve:
- Added a few bits to Law 10 about offside so you must retreat if you’re in front of a kicker, you can’t just lurk in the middle of the pitch during a kick battle.
- Changed Law 9.20 (dangerous play in a ruck or maul) to try to outlaw the crocodile roll.
- Amended quite a few laws, mostly 20 but also 19 and 17 to remove the option to take a scrum from a free kick.
Thoughts about the changes as stated
Crocodile rolls. I’m sure this will be hotly refereed initially, new law changes always are. But, particularly in Super Rugby Pacific, the existing breakdown laws are not fully enforced as they exist. It’s an ongoing set of expletive-filled ranting among the craparazzi, and much cleaner complaining in the comments here. Although I think it’s better refereed in the Northern Hemisphere in general, there are fairly clear differences between the Top14, Premiership and URC. I don’t watch the Japanese leagues or MLR, so I don’t know what they do about it. But we already have improperly applied laws in this aspect of the game, how long will these extra laws last? I applaud the idea of preventing a style of play that has the potential to injure players, I’m just not sure it’s going to have any real effect, long term.
The changes to the offside law look good. But they require you not to loiter and to actively retreat. So… you’re close to the person that’s going to catch the ball, you walk backwards so you’re actively retreating just very slowly. Now, they’ve also taken out the “carries the ball 5m” part, you need to be put onside by one of your own players, or when they kick the ball, or they play at the ball but don’t gain possession. But you’re still going to be put onside, have had a little rest as you walk back, then accelerate into their play having kept an eye on it. I think we’ll see a change in kicking distance for kick tennis, but not for the “oh shit, get it away from my try line” kicks or attempted 50-22s and the Bok plan we’ve seen up to the 2023 World Cup will be just fine – those box kicks with people from behind the scrum-half, they’re always onside and not affected by this at all. I’m thinking this is more of a cosmetic law change than anything else.
No scrums from free-kicks has a lot of people up in arms. If you’re smart you can use this to a limited extent to avoid scrums being reset. However, how often do you see free-kicks given? Apart from at marks, a few times, maybe in most games, and a team could wrangle a few more on technicalities. I’ve seen, in full, two games played under this new rule, there was one free kick where this applied across them. But the second time all those little technical offences that lead to a free kick occur, the offence steps up to a full penalty. I wonder just how much impact this will have.
Wider thoughts
As I said in the introduction, we’re used to seeing World Rugby looking at the state of the game and introducing new laws to fix what isn’t necessarily wrong. Now, some of those laws I support – I don’t have any complaints about the high tackle framework or dangerous tackles in the air. There are some edge cases that are hard to adjudicate but, overall, they’re clear and, typically, well refereed.
However, in general, we see them add laws. This year is the first year where I can remember them removing parts of laws – all the bits that let you take a scrum from a free kick have been erased.
This leads me to have two thoughts.
- Is this state of constant flux good for the game? It’s clearly not good for the Aussie commentators but even for tragics like most of us, there’s a period of adjustment as we see the game with the new laws. Even with laws that could be applied in every game, such as the high contact protocol, it takes a few games for it all to bed in. If you play 26 games, like the Top14, having four games for the new laws to bed in doesn’t really affect the outcome. If you play 14, like SRP, that isn’t really the difference between reaching the finals or not, but for teams reaching the finals it’s the difference between a home semi-final and potential final or not.
- While I don’t think no scrums from free kicks is particularly significant, I do like the fact that, pretty much for the first time that I can remember, we’ve got World Rugby trimming laws rather than adding them. Is this the way they should go? What would you like to see trimmed from the current laws?
