Hi all and welcome to another schooner full of Slatt’s Shout for 2012.
Much has passed since we last had dialogue. Some good and some, well, puzzling. I wish I could welcome you to Slatt’s Shout with a warm-n-fuzzy bit, but I cannot. I’m vexed and irked. And I need to vent. So please join me.
What’s really got me cranky, people, is simple. There are far too many stoppages in the professional level of rugby for shots at goal. Far, far, far, far tooooooo many. Rugby has a lot of elements that are frustrating and somewhat anachronistic (which I’ll deal with as we move along 2012), but bloody stoppages for bloody shots at bloody goal are irksome and vexing.
This is what gives me the poo-poos: armed with a penalty forty out and 3 points for a penalty goal and only 5 for a try, a captain would be a fruit-loop not to motion for a penalty – forcing 1000’s to grab for the remote.
Rugby does not occur in isolation, rather it sits up there in the sport-entertainment hot-box ready for consumption. As soon as rugby became a professional code and sold itself to pay-tv it became an entertainment product-this fundamentally changed the game and the way it will be presented to the people. Entertainment frames the consumption context.
And when the pay-tv subscriber is sitting on his/ her buttocks armed with an immediate ‘like/unlike’ technology known as the remote control, and with the game up against three other professional sports-AFL, soccer, and league-all simply a click away, these numerous voids in the entertainment are like sniper shots aimed in solid grouping through rugby’s heart.
I simply can’t agree with people who believe that rugby should be on free-to-air tv. In its current form
Rugby, being that much more visible in the marketplace, competing in the toughest sports entertainment market on the planet, would do long-term, possibly irreparable damage to the game.
I think one game of the S15 last weekend had 5 penalty goals a-piece. That’s 10 successful shots at goal (unsure of how many missed attempts there were). Let’s be conservative and say a penalty shot takes one minute, so one eights of that game involved blokes resting, navel gazing, and sippin’ water bottles. Is this entertainment? Is this sustainable?
Geez, I get cranky with this. I simply cannot watch a full game of rugby live. I start off, and if it’s entertaining, I keep going. If not, I flick the record button and I’m off to catch some other sport.
What’s make it worse is this down-time is filled, more often than not, with replays of the transgression, reinforcing rugby’s complexity, and backed up with commentator platitudes. It’s that ‘uckin’ boring, maybe we need to employ comedians as commentators. We can hire Murray ‘The Poet’ Hartin to recite ‘Turbulence, or ‘Rain from nowhere’ to fill in the gaps.
This necessity for entertainment has placed the game in a kinda civil war with its century old traditions and norms of how the game should be played. Repacked after repacked scrums, unimaginative and wasteful kicking, a 1000 penalties, backed up with 100’s of shots at goal. All this was fine prior to the game hooking up with television money and being promoted outside its core people. In its current form it’s better off on pay-tv where its core consumers can watch it safely, away from others.
I worry about the future of the game in this country. We need the game to flow. Remember, rugby can’t survive by appealing only to its core group-you and me. This core group is not anywhere close to the levels required to sustain the code. To appeal to those outside the game, we need to make changes. Changes that call into question a lot of the basic elements, traditions and norms of the code.
So, people, I’ve vented, now it’s your turn. Penalties (and field goals for that matter) should not be valued at greater than a third as important as scoring a try, surely-Shirley. We either reduce the points for a penalty goal to, say, one or two, or increase the value of a try to, say, nine. Discuss.
