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World Rugby is welcome to use this ball redesign idea free of charge.
World Rugby is welcome to use this ball redesign idea free of charge.

SportsMay 29, 2020

Covid-XV: Rugby’s super-genius law change ideas, explained

World Rugby is welcome to use this ball redesign idea free of charge.
World Rugby is welcome to use this ball redesign idea free of charge.

The brains trust at World Rugby have conjured up some optional law trials to obviate the risks of coronavirus. Scotty Stevenson is intrigued.

The World Rugby Executive Committee yesterday announced that it had “approved 10 optional law trials which are designed to provide national member unions with Covid-19 transmission risk reduction options if required”.

This is a sign of life at World Rugby HQ, which recently saw Sir Bill Beaumont reappointed chairman in the face of a challenge from Argentine Agustin Pichot, who has since claimed he lost because, well, a whole lot of promises were made and they weren’t his promises.

Be that as it may, the think tank has been bubbling away. The nerds have been press-ganged in to action, and World Rugby, the August Sporting Body of Our Time has gathered together the greatest minds in the sport’s history to come up with some new laws to go with the several hundred old laws to make rugby the sport of the post-Covid-19 world.

According to official statements, “The law trials were considered by the specialist Law Review Group (LRG) comprising coaches, players, match officials, medics and law specialists, following a detailed analysis of 60 matches. The LRG decided against mandatory global application of the law trials given the wide variation in the presentation and management of Covid-19 across nations.”

In other words, no one gives a shit because everyone is basically fighting for survival. In any case, and with Super Rugby Aotearoa already thinking about golden point initiatives to do away with pesky draws, what better time to look at what World Rugby’s great minds have come up in a bid to get back down to business.

Law: Remove reset scrum when no infringement occurs (eg collapse).

Sanction: Free kick to team who put the ball into the original scrum.

Rationale: 30% transmission risk reduction.

So, create a sanction for a crime that no one committed. That makes absolutely no sense.

It’s a literal middle finger to everyone who complained when you threatened to take scrums away.

The sanction is merely the outcome you proposed before people complained, you numpties. As for the rationale. Are you kidding me? You really have plucked that number out of someone’s crack.

Law: Hookers must use “brake foot” to aid scrum stability.

Sanction: Free kick.

Rationale: Increase stability on engagement to reduce scrum resets.

So now we’ll just load up one poor fat hobbit’s quad with approximately 800 kilograms of pressure so you can prevent something you have just removed in the previous law. Great. You’ve reduced transmission risk by 30% by cracking several thousand femurs this season.

Law: No scrum option for a penalty or free kick.

Sanction: N/A

Rationale: Two minutes reduction of close-proximity playing time.

Just grow some nuts and outlaw scrums. Also, now teams will just maul for 70 minutes off lineouts. *

* First they came for the scrums, and I said nothing. Then they came for the mauls.

Law: Goal line drop out when an attacker is held up in-goal or knocks on in-goal.

Sanction: N/A

Rationale: Two minutes reduction of close-proximity playing time.

It’s as if World Rugby is simply admitting absolutely no one knows how to police a scrum. Also, Rugby League. Is Peter V’landys on this damn panel?

Law: Reinforce High Tackle Sanction Framework. (Note: this was all capitalised in the official document, showing how serious it is.)

Introduction of Orange Card for Red Card (enough with the capitalisation) high tackle offence.

Sanction: Blah blah blah player removed and TMO/Citing/Hawkeye/Supreme Court ^ review incident. If deemed a Red Card offence, blah blah blah, if Yellow Card or Penalty only, the player returns after 15 minutes.

Rationale: Change behaviour from higher-tackle transmission risk upright tackles to lower-transmission risk lower tackles.

OK, I’m trying to breathe through the fit of giggling here. So let me get this straight: if it’s a penalty-only offence you still get 15 minutes in the bin and if it’s a yellow card only offence you still get fifteen minutes in the bin. Surely if it is only worth ten minutes in the bin you only get ten minutes. And surely if it’s not even worth 10 minutes you don’t get fifteen. I need a purple card because this laughing fit is about to give me a heart attack.

^ I made up the Supreme Court bit.

Law: Remove choke tackle and reward for defensive team.

Sanction: Choke tackle called as a tackle and teams must then present ball and play.

Rationale: Oh who cares. Removal of disease risk I assume.

Look, the choke tackle is a direct result of defences working their way around the last set of laws you changed. If they are allowed to play the ball then a whole bunch more players will try to steal it, presumably by diving into each other in the ensuing ruck.

Also, calling it a choke tackle is just making it sound dangerous, like calling a piece of Lego an “insole penetrating device” or your mum’s chocolate cake a “diabetes hazard”. Shut up already.

Law: Ruck use it duration time from five to three seconds.

Sanction: Free kick.

Rationale: reduce close-proximity contact time at the tackle/ruck by up to 25%.

First thing: no referee in the world has ever been able to standardise a five-second “use it” call and none will be able to do it for three. But I’m all for that two-second adjustment so halfbacks can’t stand around like complete dicks while they think about a box kick. Also, this is such hair-splitting absurdism that I just … waited … two … seconds … between … typing … these … last … words.

Law: No scrum for failure to “use it” at scrum, ruck, or maul.

Sanction: Free-kick to non-offending team.

Rationale: While rare, players will be encouraged to use the ball quicker, reducing close-proximity at base of scrum.

Here’s the point in all this when you can tell (if you haven’t been able to before now) that the consultant hired to assemble this abomination is really starting to phone this stuff in. The Oxford comma is the first giveaway. I don’t mind it, personally, but it’s a tell tale sign that Adrian, who was a mate of Bill’s cousin, Arthur, is the true author of this omnishambles of incoherent conceptual tomfoolery.

“While rare” is another tell-tale clue. It is code for ‘we are really scratching our heads to come up with ten fresh ways to make this game suck, and this is when your four hundred quid an hour is really going to save our insolvent hides.’

Also, just ban scrums. If that’s the way you feel. We’ve been here already. You know you want to.

Law: No one can join a maul if not in at the start.

Sanction: (you guessed it) free kick.

Rationale: 60% of lineout mauls have all eight forwards involved. Capping the number who can join caps the proximity risk.

Read: Only forwards will catch Covid-19.

Law: Only one forward movement in a maul.

Sanction: Free kick. (Jesus wept. There really is nothing else, is there?)

Rationale: Reducing forward movements to one, potentially halves total close-proximity time.

Now they are just putting random commas into things. Adrian is on a work-from-home and has been into the Porter again. The beer, that is.

The problem with this trial law, as best I can tell, is that if you really do get your shove on, and somehow manage to turn that one forward movement into a length-of-the-field effort, you will undo all the “close-proximity reduction” work of every other trial law combined. Which is a spectacular own-goal.

Or at least it would be, if this were as simple to follow as football.

Ardie Savea of the Hurricanes speaks to media during the 2020 Super Rugby Season Launch on January 21, 2020 in Auckland (Photo: Phil Walter/Getty Images)
Ardie Savea of the Hurricanes speaks to media during the 2020 Super Rugby Season Launch on January 21, 2020 in Auckland (Photo: Phil Walter/Getty Images)

OPINIONSportsMay 28, 2020

Athletes have embraced social media with gusto. Where does that leave journalists?

Ardie Savea of the Hurricanes speaks to media during the 2020 Super Rugby Season Launch on January 21, 2020 in Auckland (Photo: Phil Walter/Getty Images)
Ardie Savea of the Hurricanes speaks to media during the 2020 Super Rugby Season Launch on January 21, 2020 in Auckland (Photo: Phil Walter/Getty Images)

In a world where players have unfettered access to fans through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it raises the question of whether traditional media still has a role to play. But as Scotty Stevenson explains, a player-driven model powered by social media can only go so far. 

Among the many weird and wonderful tales of the late Gordon Hunter was the story often told about him taking his own tape recorder to press conferences and media interviews. Most rugby fans know him as a fine rugby coach, but he was a detective, too; a man with one good eye for bullshit and two good nostrils for sniffing it out. You can’t spend a life fighting crime and not have trust issues. He didn’t trust the media to accurately report the things he said. He kept evidence, just in case they got it wrong. A pocketful of mumbles, such are promises. 

Mistrust of the media is nothing new in the sporting world. The frustrated coach refusing to answer questions about selections and tactics or the athlete, scarred by defeat and dreading Monday’s team review, silently seething at Sunday’s three column inches of criticism are well-trodden tropes of the professional sports landscape. Sportswriters have been banned from the clubhouse, shut out of the scrum, denied access to the players and punched in the eye. Organisations have long used access as leverage. Implicit in this tactic is the adolescent threat: write anything we don’t like and you’re out of the club. No interview for you, mate. 

It was just how the game was played. And like all games, it was a contest. And like all contests, it required people to take sides. Except, it was never that simple. More often than not the sportswriter and the sportsperson were on the same side, until they weren’t. But how could anyone ever be sure? The easiest and most convenient way to pitch the game was to simplify the rules along binary lines because sport (team sport in particular) is essentially a binary pursuit. There’s a winner and there’s a loser, which is why draws are appalling: they mess with the mathematical purity of the system, like good sportswriters do. 

The rules were redrawn by the coaches, and the alpha athletes and the administrators and the burgeoning bureaucracies under the bleachers. They were recalibrated to protect investments and brands; to secure control of the message. They were drafted in the simplest way imaginable until at the heart of all rules was the one rule to rule them all: you can’t trust the media. And fair enough, too. Why would you trust someone who spends countless hours building good relationships with athletes, coaches, administrators and the sundry staff who hang about musty locker rooms like discarded socks, all for the purpose of “getting the story”? 

Why? Because maybe it’s your story. 

During a New Zealand All Blacks IRB Rugby World Cup 2011 media session at the Spencer on Byron Hotel on October 3, 2011 in Auckland, New Zealand.

This is a tweet from Ardie Savea:

“Maybe it’s that players want to control their own news and bring it out in the way the [sic] want to. Not through a media scrum where you have journos tryna get clickbait. The new wave is coming and players are realising they have control over their story through their own channels.”

Ardie Savea is the country’s best rugby player if that can be proved solely by the fact he’s the current holder of the Kelvin R. Tremain Memorial Trophy. Ardie Savea has his own channels. Ardie Savea makes clothes, makes a podcast, makes running metres, makes the most of his time. Ardie Savea can say anything he wants at a time that’s convenient to him. He could, with all false modesty, shed like the skin from last summer’s sunburn, stand on the beach at Lyall Bay in a howling gale, inflate his giant athletic lungs and boom in climactic order at the foaming sea: 

“I am a Lion! I am a Hurricane! I am an All Black! I have Twitter and Instagram!” 

But he wouldn’t do that, because Ardie Savea is not a massive wanker. In fact, he’s an incredibly likeable guy. Ask anyone who writes about rugby. They can’t get enough of him. He’s kind, generous, quick with a smile, genuine with a question, interested in people and interesting to them. When all of that’s considered, it’ll come as no surprise to you that lots of words – adjectives mainly – have been written about him. I wonder how many of those words, wet with praise, struggling to stay upright against the overwhelming desire to be italicised, he would consider “clickbait”.

Ardie Savea’s tweet was a response to a recent story written by Paul Cully, an Australian sportswriter who now calls Dunedin home (which for some reason, always makes me picture a pineapple washing up on an iceberg). That aside, the central thrust of the story is that rugby should look at how it markets itself, especially in terms of its dealings with the media. In between a bunch of marketing academic quotes that demonstrate unequivocally why marketing will never be taken seriously in academia, Cully writes that “both players and journalists dislike the short ‘standups’, with players filling them full of clichés as journalists search for a hook, leaving neither party happy”.

It’s an accurate illustration of what coverage has been reduced to in this sanitised, corporate, risk-averse professional sports world. Headlines have become more hyperbolic to mask the eternal Weekend At Bernie’s content that follows. That is, pretty much every training ground story, no matter how hard the writer works, is essentially an act of pretending a corpse is alive. Why did Larry and Richard create the illusion? Because they wanted to spend the weekend in their dead boss’s house. Why do sportswriters go along with the ruse? Because we like spending our weekends covering sport. And, let’s be honest, after almost three decades of professional rugby, the fans have become accustomed to ignoring the stiff in the corner.

The peerless Ardie Savea wanders through the Wallabies at Eden Park (Photo: Renee McKay/Getty Images)

The American author Thomas Hauser, who wrote about boxing as so many of the great writers did, once said: “[Rocky] Marciano was an idol in a simpler era, when professional athletes were heroes and sportswriters were complicit in building legends rather than exposing them”. Truth is, sportswriters are still complicit in building legends. Ardie Savea’s rugby career has been catalogued, critiqued, commended, analysed, headlined, underlined, scrutinised, scripted and re-scripted, digested with breakfast and re-fed for dinner since he emerged from Rongotai College with “Future All Black” tattooed on his forehead. Yes, where he is now is a testament to his work ethic and ability to harness his talent. But that’s not the whole story though, is it? 

Ardie Savea has risen to the top of his game on the field but his profile off it has been enhanced, waxed, shined and polished by countless columns, features, match reports and commentaries. He’s been helped, not hindered, by a legion of sportswriters in his career, and the vast majority of them are glad he’s found a way to use his voice, even if he’s chosen to amplify his message with his own megaphone on his own channels. 

I’m not sure it has to be one or the other, really. Maybe that obsession with the binary is just too hard to shake: your media is dead, watch my media instead! Nope. I know it doesn’t have to be that, and here’s why: in the next few months, a talented kid will play a game of rugby somewhere. A sportswriter will be there, watching. This kid won’t have thousands of fans and followers, she won’t be a household name, she won’t have a podcast or a clothing line or the satisfaction of potential fulfilled. She’ll play the game of her life and that writer will seek out the coach and ask about her. And then that sportswriter will talk to teammates and family and a story will form – one that tells of some extraordinary victory against the odds, or the unknown tragedy from which hope springs anew, or the remarkable set of coincidences that set in motion the chain of events that led that player to that very moment.  And over time, perhaps her legend will grow, too. Perhaps her legend will be built from there.

In a funny way, the player-driven media model espoused by Ardie Savea and many others is no different to Gordon Hunter bringing his own tape recorder to press conferences. It all comes down to controlling the message, to making sure your side of the story is all sides of the story. It’s a perfectly reasonable development, an expected outcome of a fractured landscape. All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

Of course, we want the inside word. We want to hear from the athletes. We want to pull back the curtain and have a look backstage. We’ve wanted that all along. As Frank Deford put it: “the one thing that’s largely gone out is what made sport such fertile literary territory – the characters, the tales, the humour, the pain, what Hollywood calls ‘the arc’”.

If only Noah had an arc. He would’ve saved a fortune on timber.