SPIRO: Brumbies-Waratahs in the battle of the illegal rolling maul

A victory on Friday night is critical for both the Brumbies and the Waratahs in their big match at Bruce Stadium in their race to lead the Australian Conference.

There is the consideration, too, that with nine contending sides for the final six positions, that there may be only one Australian side in the finals.

But two into one doesn’t go. So there is possibly the best chance of winning the 2015 Super Rugby tournament for either side resting on the result of the match.

Adding to the spice of the match is the fact that there is no love between the two teams. The incident relating to the Dublin Six (mainly Waratahs players) who were dobbed in supposedly by a Brumbies player during the Wallabies 2013 European tour still rankles.

The first match between the two teams this year saw David Pocock outing the South African Waratah flanker Jacques Potgieter for homophobic remarks while several scrums were being set.

Potgieter was fined. His subsequent play fell off a bit. But last week he was lethal, coming in on an angle to manhandle Rebel runners in a match in which the Waratahs, as a team, were nowhere near as impressive as they were the week earlier against the Hurricanes.

You would expect Potgieter to be somewhat over-the-top with his aggressive play on Friday night. This, in turn, could bring out over-the-top play from some of the Brumbies.

The Brumbies were not overly impressive, especially in the second half of their demolition of the Highlanders at Canberra. The Highlanders, without their three All Blacks, Aaron Smith, Ben Smith and Malakai Fekitoa, looked leaderless and without that sense of space and timing that create their thrilling break-out plays.

The Brumbies scored three tries from rolling mauls in the first half of the match against the Highlanders. All three tries involved obvious illegalities that were not picked up by the referee, the assistant referees or the TMO.

Brumbies backs rushed from their line and raced into the mauls ahead of David Pocock who was holding the ball at the back.

The Highlanders scored from a rolling maul using the same illegal play which was not quite as blatant as that of the Brumbies.

The Waratahs in their match against the Rebels scored an important try from a rolling maul that saw Michael Hooper holding the ball at the back but not legally binding during the slow Waratahs shove towards the Rebels try line.

The Waratahs and former Brumbies forward Mitchell Chapman has foreshadowed the difficulty for his team to combat the Brumbies rolling maul. “I think once the maul is set up really well, it’s hard to stop,” he told reporters.

He might well have added that when it is illegally set up, it is virtually impossible to stop, as the Highlanders found to their cost.

In anticipation of a battle between illegal rolling mauls at Canberra, I sent this email on Monday to SANZAR’s Lyndon Bray to clarify what is acceptably legal, acceptably illegal and unacceptably illegal during rolling mauls:

“Lyndon
1. In The Roar today I am very critical of the refereeing of the rolling maul during the Brumbies-Highlanders match in Canberra over the weekend.
2. There were four tries scored from rolling mauls and all of them, in my view, involved illegal play with players joining the maul ahead of the player at the back controlling the ball.
3. I explained my reasons for deeming this play illegal in my article on The Roar.
4. Do you agree that the referee and the assistant referees and the TMO were parties to allowing illegal play to be rewarded?
5. If you do agree this happened, what instructions are you issuing to SANZAR referees to police these illegalities more effectively?
6. If the referees were not acting to instructions from SANZAR to be as lenient on the law, as you suggested they should be in disallowing the legal disengagement tactic earlier in the season, what sanctions will be put in place against the referees?
7. Are you concerned that the lenient attitude SANZAR has taken towards policing the rolling mauls, especially in allowing teams to use illegal tactics, could create a rugby game that involves incessant rolling mauls?
8. I’d like to write about this later in the week and would appreciate an early reply.
9. I regard this email as a public statement and intend to publish it in due course, along with your reply.

Thank you
Spiro Zavos”

About five hours later, 7.20 pm on Monday, I received a reply from Lyndon Bray:
“Hi Spiro!

Can you give me until later tomorrow?

I will reply with pleasure – I would ask you one thing: we are working hard behind the scenes to get a suitably clear and reasonable position to share with teams and referees, in consultation with World Rugby (as what we do NOT
want to do, is go against what is acceptable moving forwards at Test level and ultimately Rugby World Cup.

I have almost completed that agreement and will be hopefully sharing a clear position with teams tomorrow afternoon.

I will be happy to share a position with you then, which I hope you will see will be in the best interests of consistency and sticking as close to the Law as possible.

L”

On Tuesday there was no reply from Lyndon Bray. But SANZAR did release the names of the referees for this week’s round of Super Rugby matches.

For the Brumbies-Waratahs match SANZAR appointed the New Zealand referee Glen Jackson as the referee. Jackson is on the panel of referees for the 2015 Rugby World Cup tournament.

The assistant referees are Matt O’Brien, who refereed the Brumbies-Highlanders match, and Frederico Anselmi. The TMO is George Ayoud, generally regarded as the leading TMO is world rugby.

What does this panel mean in the context of the controversy over the illegal rolling mauls? My guess is that Jackson has been brought in to referee the rolling mauls in a manner that is deemed acceptable to SANZAR and to the European rugby powers that dominate World Rugby (formerly known as the IRB).

But what will be this acceptable manner?

By 4.30 pm on Thursday when I was writing this article, I had not received a reply from Lyndon Bray.

But there was, in the circumstances, on Thursday morning a suspicious (to my eyes, knowing what I had written in my email to Bray) article in The Australian by Wayne Smith which carried the headline: Brumbies’ weapon may be blunted.

The opening sentence of the article is revealing: “The Brumbies are on a high alert for a refereeing crackdown on the driving maul that is shaping as their principal attacking weapon against the Waratahs in Canberra tomorrow night.”

Now where could information like this come from, in the light of the appointment of Glen Jackson as the match referee? You don’t have to be a Sherlock Holmes to work out that someone in SANZAR, presumably Lyndon Bray gave the good oil to the diligent Wayne Smith.

Smith quoted the Brumbies captain Stephen Moore saying this: “The refs have made it very clear they’re going to be looking hard at players joining the maul ahead of the ball. We have to make sure we’re not doing that. We’re very conscious of that and we’ve spoken about it at training.”

When did the “refs” make it clear they were looking hard at players joining the maul ahead of the ball? Certainly not last week at Bruce Stadium. Every rolling maul featured players joining in ahead of the last man who was holding the ball.

Presumably, Lyndon Bray passed the message on to Stephen Larkham, the coach of the Brumbies, that last week’s mauls did not pass the legality test.

If this is the case, and it is purely a surmise on my part, then we will probably see the Brumbies going back to their play from earlier in the season when close to the opposition’s try line, with their throw to the lineout.

The play was for a five-man lineout and for David Pocock to run with the ball across the field and pass to Tevita Kuridrani coming in on the angle from the centres to break through and score a try near the posts.

There is an irony here. For this move to be successful, as Rod Kafer has pointed out, Kuridrani has to break out of his position 10 metres back from the lineout before the lineout is actually over. This, like coming into the maul ahead of the player holding the ball at the back, is actually illegal play.

Will Jackson be so obsessed with watching what is happening or might happen with the maul that he missed other breaches from players like Kuridrani?

These refereeing games within the game could be as interesting as the actual play itself.

Postscript
At 6.10 on Thursday night, I received the following email from Lyndon Bray:
“Hi Spiro!

This is my reply for you.

It is important to start by saying that this is not simply ‘a Brumbies issue’ – that would be totally unfair. This issue of attacking players joining ahead of the back player in the maul is an issue across several teams (but not all), and is an issue I have to put my hand up and say that I contributed to, by allowing too much latitude at the start of the competition, therefore allowing teams to develop a technique that has become unacceptable (lesson learnt).

I have written to all Super Rugby coaches this week, obviously in tandem with work we have done with our referees, to ensure that we correct this technique before it gets more blatant and unfair towards the defence.

The Law is clear: law 17.4.c states:’Players joining the maul. Players joining a maul must do so from behind the foot of the hindmost teammate in the maul. The player may join alongside this player. If the player joins the maul from the opponents’ side, or in front of the hindmost teammate, the player is offside.’

The key to this is that when a player runs in to join an established maul, he must start by binding onto the maul, to a player at the back of the maul (who is often the ball carrier, but may not be). He must bind and then can move forward up the maul (as per defenders) and may do so as long as he remains bound.

So, I am please to say that we have had some very positive responses from the coaches and I believe we will see backs who run in to join the maul (generally from a lineout, near the goal-line, after the maul moves off the line of touch) first binding to the back player and then shifting legally forward. This is of course no different to what defenders are allowed to do.

The last point is that when the ball carrier decides to unbind and make a dive for the goal-line, it is important that any attacking in the maul, either remains bound or if he unbinds that he avoids obstructing a defender who could otherwise have attempted a tackle on the ball carrier.

We spent a week working with World Rugby to ensure that our direction around fixing this issue was in line with World Rugby’s view and that this will be followed in Test rugby. We got some excellent alignment with World Rugby which makes this a critical aspect to get right for the players and referees.

If a player clearly joins on to a maul ahead of the last player on his side of the maul, it is a penalty kick offence.

If a player with the ball ‘separates’ (loses his bind) and then rebinds onto the maul, this will be ruled as accidental obstruction and called as a Scrum (this sometimes happens when another player tries to slip in around the ball carrier and the ball carrier actually becomes totally detached from the maul.

I am sure rugby followers who understand the importance of trying to ensure that all phases of the game are both positive for attack but able to be contested and defended will be pleased that teams and referees have acted with speed and responsibility towards getting this part of the maul right.

The lineout and the driving maul are important parts of the game and these phases can produce really good, innovative approaches. But we have to ensure that we don’t allow such latitude to the attacking team that it becomes entirely unfair, or seen as an area of the game that you simply cannot defend.

Hopefully, we will see a really good response around this issue when we watch Round 12.

Lyndon.”

As well as thanking Lyndon Bray for this thoughtful discussion, I would make a couple of comments about what he says in this email.

First, I believe that SANZAR got itself into trouble on this issue of the rolling maul when it failed to see that that the driving side had to be subjected to greater scrutiny and less latitude regarding the laws because the driving maul is essentially an illegal play that has been sanctioned, with certain conditions.

This is a philosophical point that lawmakers and interpreters of the law like Lyndon Bray do not seem prepared to concede. This problem, therefore, would never have arisen if referees had actually be told to apply the strict letter of the law to the driving side.

This notion of strict liability for the driving side needs to be applied on every aspect of maul play.

There is another reason for this, aside from the fact that the rolling maul is essentially a sanctioned illegality, and it is this: a basic principle of rugby, as laid out in World Rugby’s Charter On The Game, is that rugby is a game where there is a constant contest for possession. There is no contest with the rolling maul. Therefore the laws or the way they are applied should compensate for this by allowing some latitude to the defending side.

Finally, it will be fascinating to see how the rolling mauls in the Brumbies-Waratahs are played and refereed knowing what we now know (thanks to Lyndon Bray) and knowing that the Brumbies, the Waratahs and Jackson also know this.