Super Rugby Pacific starts on Friday, February 13, when the Highlanders host the Crusaders.
New law tweaks aim to speed up play and reduce stoppages.
These changes apply only to Super Rugby, not test matches, potentially affecting players’ test performance.
Super Rugby Pacific is back next week and will look a bit different, thanks to some new law changes. Designed to reduce stoppages, inspire positive play and – most importantly – simplify the viewing experience, they have been pretty wellreceived by a public keen to see a repeat of last year’s highly entertaining competition.
Probably the most obvious will be the new sanction for joining a ruck after the referee has called “use it”, which should mean the ball is cleared quicker. Accidental offsides and teams delaying playing the ball away from a ruck are now free kicks, so in turn here’s more leeway around taking quick taps.
One change that probably won’t be seen often but will certainly have an impact is it will no longer be mandatory for the referee to issue a yellow or red card to a player on the defending team when awarding a penalty try. There seems to be an awful lot of guesswork around this at the moment in open play, with players carded being more unlucky than anything else, but the real positive is that it won’t result in a mess at scrum time.
Leroy Carter on the run for the Chiefs. Photo / Photosport
A dominant attacking scrum on an opponent’s line that results in a penalty try also meant that a defensive side’s prop would get binned, and therefore needed to be replaced at the next scrum. That in turn meant another player would have to go off to reduce the team’s numbers: if this happened late in a game, it would mean rolling players back on who have already been subbed off.
So, it’s not bad at all from the officials who have put all this together in order to get some free-flowing rugby going.
The only issue, and it’s not a new one, is that this is all for Super Rugby Pacific only. Once July rolls around, those changes don’t apply for test matches and the effects of that may well be playing a part in why the All Blacks have struggled in the last few seasons.
It’s not that the players can’t snap back into playing a tighter game plan, they are professionals and should be able to do that easily. Beauden Barrett and Damian McKenzie have both shown they can run the ball out of their 22 from February to June, then kick it more often than not when they’re in a black jersey.
But the problem isn’t at their end. Speeding the game up and presumably reducing kicking means players coming through at the other won’t be exposed to as many repetitions as their foreign counterparts. The average back-three player won’t have had to field anywhere near as many bombs, track across the field chasing kicks or simply position themselves on-field as often an English or South African of the same age. Meanwhile, props won’t have as many scrums, halfbacks won’t box kick as often, and so on.
It’s offset somewhat by the fact that by the business end of the competition, Super Rugby is played in colder conditions, with more on the line, so therefore the gameplans will adjust accordingly. One look at last year’s final can attest to that, but the fact still remains that Super Rugby Pacific is the tier below a test rugby landscape that’s moved far closer to repetitive scenarios decided by fine margins than off-the-cuff play.
Again, that’s not new. It’s just that those fine margins seem to be far more in the favour of who the All Blacks are playing.
One thing is for sure with Super Rugby Pacific, though: they’ve stayed committed to reducing the role of the TMO in general play, with the man upstairs only allowed to intervene unprompted if the referee has overlooked an act of serious foul play or some other massively obvious error when a team scores a try.
This is bound to be popular and hopefully it catches on in test rugby, because while we should all be mindful of how difficult the officials’ jobs are these days, no one likes watching them talk to each other all that much.
