Rugby league fans will gain up an extra two minutes of live action when a shot clock is introduced at the beginning of next season for scrums and line dropouts.
The NRL also confirmed on Wednesday that the number of interchanges would be reduced from 10 to eight, in a move that is expected to increase fatigue and cut the number of injuries.
NRL Head of Football Todd Greenberg said it wasn’t a case of simply wanting to speed the game up.
“It’s about keeping the game continuous and making sure the fans continue to have a product that they want to watch, but equally about making sure that the injuries for our players continue to decrease,” he said.
Last year, 80 per cent of players in the NRL missed at least one match through injury – the highest count in the game’s history.
A feasibility study – initiated by the governing body, together with three years of GPS data from 11 NRL clubs – predicted that number to increase to 90 per cent by 2024.
“Fatigue is an important part of the game, but we need to look at decreasing injuries as well,” Greenberg said.
“Player athletes have never been fitter, faster and stronger. So we expect this will change the way that the coaches and high performance units at clubs manage their athletes.”
A decision on the length of the shot clock has yet to be determined, however the governing body is set to experiment with a time of 30-35 seconds in the under-20s competition over coming weeks, as well as dead-rubber NRL games towards the end of this season.
The rules will state that when a team fails to pack a scrum or kick the dropout when time expires, the offending team will be penalised.
“It’s not looking to get players sprinting to scrums and speeding the game up,” Greenberg said.
“But what it is looking to do is stop time wasting and stop players standing around for inordinate amounts of time, waiting for the ball to be put back into play.
“Fans will appreciate that, as will players, because it will give them some certainty on when the game starts again.”
The implementation of a referee bunker is also close to being rubber-stamped, with the proposal set to be put before the ARL Commission later in the year.
Statistics reveal the video referee is being called on an average of four times a game, leaving fans waiting up to three minutes for live action to resume.
About 30 games have already been trialled with the new technology, with early results reducing time wasted by half.
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