Youtube highlights of rugby matches are usually terrible: 5minutes of only the point scoring and goal kicking, with angle replays. When in reality there is only around 30min of ball in play over an 80min match.
Just cut out all non-ball-in-play and give us a good 20 min highlight of ball in play. It’ll be quicker for the editors too. And talking about ball in play:
There has been a huge outcry for punishing refs after bad performances. But there is a simpler solution: WR needs to simplify an overly complicated rule book. Rugby has become too complex for the human brain to rightly process the variety of laws being broken in each moment.
Scrums and rucks are indistinguishable from magic. A ref could blow either way and technically you’d find something to justify his call.
Scrum set up, resets, and a high probability of a penalty make every scrumdown simultaneously a game changing gamble and a snoozefest to be fast forwarded.
We have to stop penalizing scrum technicalities. Make it a sheer power and skill contest again. Boring in? don’t care. Collapse? don’t care. Just get the frikken ball out! Ironically this will probably solve collapsing because there will be no reward for it anymore.
Ruck time has become a gordian knot. How do we begin to simplify this? The contest for the ball on the ground is one of the key distinctions from rugby league. Its important. Yet ruck penalties are the constant gripe of everyone not named Richie McCaw.
We could go back to the old rule: no hands in the ruck, you literally have to drive over the ball to win it.
Now for the worst part of the game, may God forgive me for uttering these words, but: “the boxkick.”
Boxkicks are like abusing the glitch in a computer game. Snoozefest and high chance of producing a card for taking the man out in the air, each time.
I understand why we boxkick:
Defensive excellence makes it risky to play in our own half.
Our chasers are right on the gainline rather than 10m back when our 10 kicks it.
High chance of getting the ball back rather than pingpong or chance of counterattack when our 10 kicks it.
But it needs to stop.
A popular suggestion has been allowing a mark-catch on any boxkick, anywhere on the field.
The rugby we love playing & watching is Ball In Hand.
Scrum penalties, ruck penalties, and boxkicking are the cryptonite of Ball In Hand play.
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