Penalty-ball, Sille-ball, or rugby?

 
The Crowd Roar Pro

By Doug Buckley, 17 Aug 2009 The Crowd is a Roar Pro

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Rugby is less of a ball-in-hand than it was meant to be, less of a team game than it used to be, and a very much less positive game than it need be. But statistics might save it?

From the top: 1823 is the year, William Web Ellis the boy, Rugby the place, and rugby the game he invented. A ball-in-hand game. Instead of kicking the ball, he caught it and ran with it in his hands, or so it is widely believed.

Certainly for most of its near two centuries, rugby has been a team game for young (mainly) men who want to get their hands on that ball, run with it with as much speed and skill and strength and intelligence as they can muster, or pass it astutely to teammates who might do better.

That is, it is not primarily a game about kicking. Soccer and AFL are there if you get your kicks – so to speak – from whacking leather into leather. Our game includes this but demands a wider range of skills.

But the Northern Hemisphere mandarins who dominate rule-making, are destroying it.

In South Africa’s recent game against the All Blacks (1 August) which South Africa won 31-19, no less than 40 of the game’s 50 points came directly from, of all things, kicking.

Then last weekend (8 April) Australia beat South Africa at the ball-in-hand game two tries to one, yet lost the match.

Maybe the The Roar should publicize the Tri-Nation statistics of tries for and against. Or better, points from tries, including conversions, since they reflect the game as many of us believe it ought to be. Probably include cumulative figures.

Moreover, Rugby used to be a team game. Yet all of those 31 South African points – you know, 100% – were scored by one man.

Mr Morné Steyn is a fine kicker of the ball, a good player generally, and doubtless a fine chap, but no team game for 44 players should rest on whether just one man has an on or an off day.

And how boring is all that dead-time as we wait for goal-kicks?

Further, sport is and should be a healthy way for young blokes to put in an hour or two at the weekend. Wouldn’t that time be far better spent in a positive game? Yet 36 of those 50 points came from, of all pathetic entities, penalties.

This would be disgracefully negative enough, but on top of that, about a third of those were cynically milked (if that game was typical). So why don’t we just call it Penalty-Ball and publicise the numbers of penalties? Again The Roar could help here.

Then there is a weird second consequence of the above: endless leather-booting just to get the ball into penalty-booting range, a double whammy.

So instead of primarily a ball-in-hand game we have a kicking game. Instead of a team game we have results very often dominated by one player. In addition to all of that, it is not too hard to win negatively, that is from mere penalties, sometimes or often, actually milked.

The rules have failed to keep up with modern tactics, particularly defensive tactics.

We need once again to take on those Northern Hemisphere characters who have lost the plot, the Ellis plot.

Bring back those short-arm penalties! Maybe Ken Menz’s idea of giving twenty metres with short-arm penalties is one way to go. And maybe The Roar can play a historic role in this.

On second thoughts, Sille-Ball would be a better name than Penalty-Ball. The reverse of Ellis. Pronunciation optional.

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