Rugby in regression

 
The Crowd Roar Guru

By Greg Truman, 10 Aug 2009 The Crowd is a Roar Guru

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Arguably the best advertisement for rugby league in 100 years or so was the 2007 rugby union World Cup.

For the most part, the rugby was ponderous; ball-in-hand attack virtually non-existent in some key games and the refereeing was beyond appalling. The officials, at the undoubted urging of the IRB, latching onto the school-masterly approach so prominent in the British and Irish game.

In the last few years the ELVs, despite their flaws, were a breath of fresh air for anyone wanting to see rugby played at pace and in an overtly positive style. But the rule experiments were anything but perfect, providing the little bit of fuel critics needed to shut the door on the much-needed tweaking of the modern game.

So now we’re back to playing the game the gin and tonic set, the fatboys and the rugby establishment’s blindly loyal fourth estate gatekeepers declare to be the original and the best.

A match that evens the gap between the most athletic players and the lesser so — where the contest isn’t about scoring tries but rather establishing field position and getting on the good side of the referee.

To their credit, the Springboks are unmistakably, proving to be the best in the world at this form of the game. They may well be the best rugby team in the world too, but the way the Tri-Nations is being played and officiated we’ll probably never know.

Rugby union, as we are constantly reminded by the ‘purists’, is not rugby league. There are more layers to the game — it’s a game for all body types, a contest of strength skill and speed, but also guile and vision.

Some of that conjecture is on the money, but a good slab of it steaming horseshit, a defensive reaction to the fact that on occasion over the last 40-years or so league has been a vastly more skillful and entertaining game. Its officiating has been more consistent, its players more athletic, its strategies (in defense and attack) often-times more intricate and innovative.

Being a mungo admirer is not rugby treachery. Additionally, it doesn’t ignore some of the inadequacies of league, including its lack of complexity or diversity through the phases of play.

But watching the Tri-Nations armed with a love of rugby — union first, league second — and a loathing of over-officious officiating, it is becoming clear that rugby union is again poised to disappear up its own enormous derriere.

South Africa is a wonderful team and while the Boks are winning, all murmurs of dissatisfaction with the way they are playing the game will be put down as sour grapes or mindless whining from daft Wallabies supporters (moi) or those pesky New Zealanders.

That’s fine. Winners are grinners. And sure, for all the drivel about the Wallabies wanting to play running rugby, they would likely play a not hugely dissimilar style if they could get their hands on the ball or stop drifting off to sleep for crucial slabs of matches.

But don’t ignore the wider implications of the game reverting to a style of play that empowers the referee, again, to be the most crucial person on the field.

Lengthy discussion about the ELVs will send us off in the wrong direction, however it should be said, under those experiments the ref could make a blinding error or two in adjudicating, especially at the breakdown without it largely changing the momentum of games or undermining the conspicuous rugby superiority of one side over another.

Referees have too much to do and too much power (the full-arm for virtually every infringement). At every contest there is the potential for blowing up play for multiple infringements — we all know that — and the scrums are a lottery: front rowers, especially know that.

What has been happening this season (and in most games in British competition) is the official ends up ‘refereeing’ one team more than the other, perhaps because if he pulled up every infringement, he’d be blowing the pea out of the whistle.

It’s no so much what the ref is getting wrong, but what he’s selecting to get right.

That’s not to infer overt bias or cough up excuses for losing teams (Australia, for example, has has both benefited and suffered at the hands of officious refs this year), rather it’s a reflection of the on-going problems with the game the ELVs tried and failed to address in the brief time they were on show.

For some rugby lovers, it’s not about making union more like league, but less like the rugby that used to be played semi-seriously in a couple of countries by a bunch of white, former private school kids.

The complexity of the game does not need to be watered down, its traditions need not be interfered with, but in the professional age, rugby’s credibility as a viable global spectator sport for people who value athletic brilliance and occasional audacity is at risk.

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