Rugby: Board lines up crash tackle on rugby laws

By CHRIS HEWETT Herald correspondent

It may be rugby, Jim, but not as we know it.

Fourteen tactical substitutions a game - sometimes more, if the coaches indulge in a little jiggery-pokery with their blood capsules; sin-binnings and video referrals by the dozen, from officials who flatly refuse to make a tight call if there is an easy way out; disciplinary citings by the gross, almost always from losing teams; enough protective padding to equip an entire Super Bowl, crowd and all; and, to put the tin lid on it, so to speak, closed stadium roofs in Cardiff and Melbourne. Well, the game is hard enough, without the players getting wet.

Having presided over all these glorious developments, that self-perpetuating exercise in oval-ball grandeeship known as the International Rugby Board is now considering ways of repairing at least some of the damage.

There are proposals on the table - 79 pages of them, in fact - that might be said to re-embrace "real rugby," as opposed to the gimmick-ridden species of the game nurtured by the decision-makers since the dawning of professionalism 5 1/2 years ago.

The central planks of the discussion document recently sent to national unions for their perusal concern the lineout, the tackle, the breakdown area and the substitution issue.

Many of the more significant moves have the backing of Allan Hosie, the former international referee from Glasgow who chairs the IRB's laws committee.

The leading Southern Hemisphere nations, who have been driving the bus from the day they sold themselves to that life-long rugby aficionado Rupert Murdoch, are certain to fiercely oppose some of the more radical re-appraisals. But there is at least a chance of progress when the parties get together in March.

Hosie's push for a return to competitive lineouts could go a very long way towards creating more space on the field and re-establishing top-level rugby as a showcase for all shapes and sizes.

Under the new proposals, the lifting and supporting of jumpers would be banned.

While both the law of gravity and the jungle element would be restored to one of the mechanisms that separates rugby union from its 13-a-side cousin, the benefits would by no means be restricted to the set-piece.

Ball-winning at a fully contested lineout requires the kind of elongated specialist rendered obsolete by the introduction of lifting. Remember Steve Cutler, the Wallaby lock? Or Martin Bayfield, of England, Neil Francis, of Ireland, Olivier Roumat, of France?

These people could get off the ground in the middle of what amounted to a street fight, take a clean catch and deliver prime possession to an admiring halfback without batting an eyelid.

What they could not do, being 2m tall or more and generally giraffe-like in their movements, was offer any meaningful contribution to contemporary defensive theory by making 20 tackles a match.

One or two fewer tacklers on each side means more room for the runners. Simple, eh?

Once upon a time, the lineout was central to the outcome of a match.

In 1993, Bayfield effectively shut the All Blacks out of a test in Wellington and allowed the Lions to claim a historic victory.

During the course of the following week, the New Zealanders worked him out. They changed their line-up, changed their strategy and changed the course of the series.

Under existing rules, that light and shade has disappeared: at the elite level, most teams fill the back fives of their packs with identikit forwards who can do a bit of everything - jump, support, run and, most importantly, tackle. Interesting it is not.

Happily, the IRB is also looking long and hard at the replacement system, which has become a cancer in the sport. The last quarter of almost every major contest, be it an international match or a club game, is wrecked by substitutions: what should be a climactic surge towards the final whistle is now little more than a staccato shambles.

Some players - Ollie Le Roux, of South Africa, is a prime example - are conditioned specifically to play 20 minutes of rugby rather than 80. As soon as one of Le Roux's front-row compatriots finds himself out of breath, the switch is made.

There are a number of proposals on this issue in the law-change document, the most sweeping of which is a reduction in match-day squad sizes from 22 to 18: that is to say, three possible replacements rather than seven.

Widespread dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs suggests that the 18-man option will win substantial backing, and may even be implemented at the start of the 2001-02 Northern Hemisphere season.

Poor old Ollie will be faced with an awkward choice - get properly fit, or get a prop job - but for the rest of us, it will be manna from heaven.

New takes on the contentious tackle issue are less clear-cut. One proposal outlaws any tackle above the waist, which would make close-range defence almost impossibly difficult. However, it would also prevent the wrap-up tackle and, therefore, minimise the amount of ball-killing on the floor.

Another notion is to force the first player at a breakdown situation to play the ball with his foot before picking it up: interesting in theory, fiendishly complex in practice.

There are no soft solutions to the tackle-ball problem and it is increasingly evident that the IRB will eventually have to bite the bullet and sanction the re-introduction of the ruck as a means of stopping the ball-killers in their tracks.

A bit of treatment from an All Black pack invariably persuades an offending opponent that there are better ways of spending a Saturday afternoon. Ruthless, yes, but the best rugby was never any different.

This latest discussion document is one of the most challenging for years, and rugby's many sceptics will take some persuading that the IRB possesses the willpower to break the Southern Hemisphere's stranglehold on law changes and move the game away from the Super 12 and Tri-Nations' obsession with "continuity of possession."

But then, the IRB grandees have proven themselves capable of thinking the unthinkable in the recent past.

These are the people who allowed themselves to imagine that the Five Nations' Championship could continue without England, that certain senior Welsh figures were entirely blameless for the Grannygate scandal, that last year's World Cup was an organisational triumph.

By comparison, the mental leap required to uninvent a few wonky rugby wheels is small beer indeed.