Sports After Dark

IRB chairman Syd Millar has called for the use of rugby’s experimental laws in next year’s Super 14, but that call has come a little late for one Super 14 coach.

The World Cup final was an intriguing, tight but rather uninspiring contest. Remove the context of it being a World Cup final and many would have labelled the game boring. But right now defence wins championships, South Africa showed it in the World Cup, the Crusaders have shown it in Super 14 but that is something the IRB are keen to change, looking for a more open, attack focused game.

“Defences are on top at the moment,” said Millar after the final. “We need to free the game up a bit, make it easier to play, easier to referee, easier to understand and we have to produce more options for the players,” he added.

“We have asked the southern nations to try these new laws in the Super 14 which is near enough international level. Hopefully they will agree to that.”

But the call to use the new laws for the 2008 Super 14 came as a surprise to Chiefs coach Ian Foster. He said that lessons should be learned from the change to the scrum engagement process at the beginning of this year which he felt was rushed and produced more reset scrums, the exact opposite of its intention.

Foster said that some of the new laws are common sense, such as moving the corner posts out of the field of play, but others needed further analysis. The laws have already been trialled in New Zealand’s provincial B competition as well as the new Australian Rugby Championship, but Foster doubts the IRB’s claims that those competitions have seen the ball in play for 10 percent longer, suggesting that some think the game is actually slower.

Adopting the new laws for the Super 14 would also be a politically risky move for SANZAR, as the new laws will not be officially ratified until at least June 2008, well after the Super 14 final. If the final version of the laws changes from the experimental stage, that would mean three seasons in a row under different laws for Super 14.

Another option for the IRB is to simply leave the laws how they are and let coaches and players think of new ways to solve dominating defences. All sports go through periods where defence dominates attack, but then the new defensive patterns are solved and attack will dominate, and so on.

Whatever the IRB decide, Foster’s advice to just “sit back, take a deep breath and actually analyse what is going on,” is sound. Perhaps bring in the new laws for 1 January 2009, but changing the laws now is too late, and will only result in confusion and frustration for all involved.

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The IRB call for experimental laws in Super 14 premature by Hamish McBrearty, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.