Tinkering with rules to suit themselves

Nov 28 2007 by Our Correspondent, Liverpool Daily Post

WHY do they have to keep tinkering with the laws of the game? Having watched rugby at all levels this season I cannot think what is wrong with the game as it is played now.

There have been games where the respective packs have knocked ‘seven bells’ out of each other, games were the ball has flowed to produced great movement and excellent tries and games where defences have been on top, you can even get the odd punch up!

Such are the possibilities that when you turn up for a game anything can be on offer at no matter what level.

It can be exciting, tense, frustrating but rarely boring yet the law makers want in their words to make it more ‘spectator friendly’, whatever that might mean.

Being of a suspicious nature the fact that most of the calls for change emanate from the southern hemisphere make me doubly so.

There are those who site the latter stages of the World Cup and England’s performance in particular with too much kicking and not enough running rugby, they might have a point but at least we got to the final.

They seem to forget that these same laws gave us some great games with superb attacking rugby.

It was as it should be: beauty and the beast: flair and brute force in equal measure.

Who could not rise to the ferocity of Thormond Park or the way Bristol slugged it out to beat Stade Francais in the Heineken Cup a couple of weeks back. Likewise the slick running and inter-passing of Toulouse on their way victory over Leinster.

It was all so different yet each as engaging as the other.

But now the talk is of allowing a maul to be pulled down, hands in at the ruck, changing the offside line to five metres beyond the back foot at a scrum and only allowing a kick at goal from foul play.

In my view this might will de-power the scrum and it is no coincidence that Australia, one of the nations behind this, haven’t a clue about scrummaging anyway. They site the speed and pace of Super 14, that’s okay if you like tick and pass with tackling but who wants to watch an inferior version of rugby league when I can turn up at Knowsley and watch the real thing and an infinitely better product.

Another consequence which has been overlooked is that the game caters for all shapes and sizes, change the scrum and that will disappear to the detriment of the game as a whole especially as you go further down the league structure.

My view is leave well alone.