David Leggat: Rugby looks for simple answers to improve game

For those who reckon quantum physics, the Big Bang and learning Cantonese are a doddle compared with making sense of the rules of rugby, help is at hand.

A week-long conference at Stellenbosch University in South Africa over the past few days may be the starting point in changing the game as we know it.

The International Rugby Board put together a group of learned men - including New Zealander Paddy O'Brien, World Cup-winning Australian coach Rod Macqueen, former Springbok coach Ian McIntosh and former French player, coach and commentator Pierre Villepreux - to find ways to simplify the game.

The basic idea was to expand the cans, cut down the cannots, cut out the head scratching and make watching rugby an easier exercise.

All sorts of ideas were floated:

* Allowing hands to be used to get the ball at the breakdown.

* Teams no longer needing to have equal numbers at the lineout.

* Teams who get a penalty in the opposition half and kick for touch would lose the lineout feed.

* Only foul play and offsides would result in penalties. Other offences would be punished by a free kick.

* Narrowing the "gate" - the point of entry at rucks - so that players' backsides must be facing their own goal line.

* Allowing teams to make up to 12 replacements from a smaller bench.

And that's before we even get to sorting out the scrum.

At Stellenbosch, four teams took part in fully competitive videotaped sessions to assess which variations had significant merit.

Nothing will happen until after next year's World Cup, but the fact the IRB went to the trouble of organising the gathering means it realises what many already know: The game, which can be thrilling and competitive, is too messy and too hard to fathom in too many respects.

When you have a game whose decisions spectators and television viewers can't understand, when referees have too much room for individual interpretation, and when players can't follow why the whistle was blown and they've been fingered for the infringement, you've got problems.

Who said the following:

"There's something fundamentally wrong with rugby when you and I can sit watching a game and you ask, 'What's that penalty for?'

"And I say, 'It's white No 6 coming in from the side'. Then you say, 'What about red No 6? He's doing exactly the same'."

Step forward Mr O'Brien, the Southlander who was among the world's best referees and is now the Dublin-based IRB's referees manager.

"If we want to get it right all the time, we'd put an ear piece in every player and sit up in the TV box and referee from there, calling out, 'No 7, you're offside. Get out of there'.

"Either we become robots and go down the American football road and have matches that last three hours where every decision is replayed and analysed, or we carry on with what we have."

Anyone who has sat through an American football game knows the answer to that one, and particularly if some degree of uniformity in decision-making can be found round the globe.

Some of the ideas plainly won't make it through the IRB's screening process. Some shouldn't anyway.

The IRB does not always get it right, but at least there seems a determination to get the grey matter working and find solutions to improve the current lot for all parties.