Confusion over rugby rules causes anarchy in the UK
When is a forward pass not a forward pass? The law of the game manages to mystify both spectators and commentators
THE snakes of anarchy are slithering throughout rugby. Laws and officiating are nearing total collapse, causing confusion and anger. The rule book, supposedly the core of the whole activity, is now treated as a rough guide, a series of options, of which even the key elements can be ignored on a whim. The 2015 Rugby World Cup could deliver six weeks of controversy and fury. In a nutshell, no one knows what the current laws actually are.
Examine written accounts or television replays or social media comment on almost all big rugby matches (and probably most amateur games) and you will see growing chaos, coaches ranting, spectators bewildered, bizarre interaction between the officials. And your team, the one you paid to watch, are losing for random reasons. The anarchy is spreading.
But what you will not hear is any reaction from the governing body, which wrote the laws and is supposed to interpret them, impose them and administer them. The International Rugby Board hierarchy is mute. Stone-cold silent.
Examples? How many do you need? Perhaps the crippling inertia is typified by the scrum feed. It has been as crooked as a dog’s hind leg for decades and contributed to the disappearance of scrum skills. So the IRB brought in new scrum protocols, a key tenet of which was the straight put-in. For about three weeks last September referees insisted on it. Now, after less than one season, we are back to the dog’s hind leg and no referee is still asking for the law to be applied. And what of the IRB, backing up its instruction, insisting that referees penalise the crooked put-in? Mute.
We know the breakdown and tackle area has been a farce but it is now a random shambles. Watch Super 15 games and the players are illegally on the floor in a crabbing mass.
The ruck? In every game we see players charging in and smashing helpless opponents, even though that is against the law, which says they must be bound on a teammate as they enter.
The scrum? Most referees let teams push illegally before the ball arrives. Offside? Every high kick is seemingly pursued by chasers in front of the kicker. Rear feet offside? The last man penalised for this offence was Noah.
As for forward passes, there are no longer any. Let me recap for anyone (clearly including the IRB) who failed to grasp the denunciation of the “momentum rule” in these pages before Christmas. An Australian rugby coach found, by marking parallel lines across a field one yard apart, that passes looking to the naked eye to have been fair and backward in reality travelled forward because of the physics law of relative velocity. Longer passes ruled legal actually travelled well forward.
The IRB then made a clown-like, non-sequiturial error. It loosened the application of the law to farcical proportions and said many passes looking forward to the naked eye were to be allowed as long as the hands of the receiver faced forward, arguing that the ball could not have been passed forward to him if his hands were facing it.
That missed the point horribly. Go back to the parallel lines. They proved a huge number of passes that looked backward to the naked eye were forward. Therefore if a pass looks forward to the naked eye, it must be way forward, off-the-planet forward.
The sport is now duly swamped with frightened referees opting out of blowing up for blatant forward passes because they may be falling foul of an unseen science. It is drivel. The only way to go is to revert (immediately) to the trusted maxim that if the pass looks forward to the naked eyes of the referee and touch judges then it is definitively forward. As for relative velocity, who the hell cares? It can velocity off.
The referee is a sportsman, not a scientist. It is remarkable how well the experts such as Wayne Barnes and Nigel Owens manage to cope.
Far too many IRB laws and law revisions are ill-conceived and badly explained, as well as simply forgotten. But, far worse, the process and central machinery for imposing them and maintaining uniformity does not even exist. The laws are handed down from on high and all the unions, referees’ bodies, coaches, individual referees and players are expected to get on with it.
There is no back-up, no reinforcement, no ready central source of reference for clarification, no insistence that referees apply the laws, nothing. The IRB talks always of cascading information down into the game. But instead, it all disappears off into a trillion scattered rivulets, to take wrong turns, to become poisonous to the original ethos, to peter out and to dry up in dead ends. The whole process is a pathetic disservice to rugby.
Anarchy in the UK — and across the world.
