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Rationale behind proposed new laws is bonkers - and the IRFU response wasn't great either

Brendan Fanning

World Rugby have suggested some new laws to avoid contact

19 January 2020; Conor Murray of Munster prepares to feed the ball into a scrum during the Heineken Champions Cup Pool 4 Round 6 match between Munster and Ospreys at Thomond Park in Limerick. Photo by Diarmuid Greene/Sportsfile

May 31 2020 02:30 AM

You have to run to keep up with this virus. With or without a mask. A while back World Rugby handed us a bunch of stuff to consider in the way they always do.

Let's run a trial where this gets tweaked and that gets binned and see where it all leaves us. Surely there is not another sport on the planet that spends as much time under the microscope?

This is a good thing. It should be a concern on one level that a sport can be so violent and dangerous, but reassuring that those who run it are not nodding off and letting things take their natural course. Inevitably there are lots of things you don't agree with, but that's the nature of it.

What we have currently on the table, however, is an array of dishes, some of them hard to recognise at all.

In Australia last year they trialled an interesting twist called the 50-20 law: if you could kick the ball from your own half and bounce it into touch in your opponents' 22 then you would get the lineout throw. This was all about forcing teams to defend the backfield, thus freeing up some space elsewhere. It was inconclusive but well worth the effort.

The plan was for this to be extended across the 2020 calendar year, along with: a law lowering the tackle height to the waist; another giving a goal-line drop out instead of a five metre scrum when an attacking player was held up in-goal; and the introduction of a ceiling for team offences, so when it would be breached the offender would get an automatic yellow card. Fine.

The theme to all of the above, sometimes indirectly, was safety. Then we got into lockdown super safety mode. And the adage about not wasting a good crisis presented itself. So under the cover of Covid-19 we are being asked to take the grunt out of rugby.

On top of the laws outlined above, World Rugby have now weighed in with a barrage of stuff. Like the restaurant menu that gives you a calorie count in brackets, here comes rugby's laws that will cut your chances of catching the virus.

Ostensibly these law trials are all about risk reduction. So if you can close some of the windows where players are in close combat then, ergo, you reduce the risk of them getting the virus.

So reset scrums are off the menu. A reset scrum is by definition a no-fault scenario. That's why it's being reset. It raises the anxiety levels of referees because they know that if it goes down again they will be under pressure to apportion blame. Lots of times they make those decisions in the dark. It is one of rugby's great weaknesses.

Now we're being asked to bypass the blame bit and go straight to the sanction: a free kick. Rather than reset the scrum the referee will give a free kick to the side who fed the ball to the same scrum. It has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with expediency. And will the captain who opts to scrum his free kick award be horse whipped on the spot?

No, that's covered in Law Trial No 3: if you are awarded a penalty or free kick at a scrum then you can't use it to scrummage again. Hmm. So you can see a very subtle theme emerging here.

We don't doubt the sincerity of the World Rugby folks in coming up with ways to reduce the risk of catching Covid-19 while playing our game. You suspect they were mindful of due diligence in all of this, and being seen to be shutting as many doors as possible.

Some of the rationale seems bonkers though. If you have an infected forward, covering the ground and spraying droplets like a piece of agricultural machinery, then cutting the number of scrums by maybe 30 per cent doesn't look like a winner. There are so many other points of contact or close proximity where the damage can be done.

World Rugby said on their website that unions can apply to implement one or all of the temporary law amendments as trials at elite or community level. You'll get very long odds against any of the elite touching the anti-scrum stuff with a barge pole.

But there are bits and pieces well worth looking at: the 50-22; the reduction in 'use it or lose it' time from five seconds to three; the waist-high tackle; the goal-line drop out for hold-ups in goal.

So if you have a passing interest in rugby in this country you'd like to know what's coming down our particular track. World Rugby are wide open to approaches from unions willing to road-test this stuff as soon as the game kicks off again. Will any of the above be part and parcel of the AIL when that restarts, in whole or in part, next season? Will they be part of the schools or youths game? Maybe under 20s, or the adult junior codes?

"The IRFU have reviewed and noted the World Rugby guidelines," the IRFU told us last week. "We are focussing on our comprehensive risk mitigation plans, which include screening and adapting new protocols and practices, as part of our return to rugby programme."

Think about that for a moment. The body which runs the game in this country, an organisation you would hope is stuffed with people who have a knowledge of and feel for it, are asked a simple question. And that's what they come up with. Cheers lads.

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