Wayne Smith urged for a crackdown on driving mauls. Photo / Photosport
Wayne Smith urged for a crackdown on driving mauls. Photo / Photosport
OPINION:
Rugby is in a race against time to see if it can magically cure itself of inconsistency, pedantry and conspiracy ahead of the World Cup.
When a figure as steeped in rugby as Wayne Smith says he’d rather watch the wildebeest sweep majestically across the Serengeti than yet onemore driving maul, then it’s undeniable that the sport has a problem that needs to be addressed before the world turns up in France later this year.
Smith will have struck a chord with many long-time followers when he said that he now finds rugby boring because so many games get locked into a familiar and predictable pattern around using the rolling maul as a weapon after exploiting the advantage law.
Rugby’s great strength is the breadth of strategic options it offers: the multiple ways in which teams can build an attacking threat to suit their various athletes and skill-sets.
The great lament, however, of the last few years, as echoed by Smith, is that the driving maul has replaced all other forms of strategic development and is in fact the only attacking ploy some teams possess.
It has become a ploy so overused as to have cast the piano movers as not so much the new stars of the game, but the only stars of the game.
Smith speaking out has given the rank and file a sense of vindication that they are right to be so disgruntled and disillusioned by the direction in which rugby has gone, but it’s not clear whether he feels coaches, players, referees or administrators are responsible for the men’s game being in the mess it is.
This heavy reliance on the driving maul alludes to a lack of coaching imagination. It hints at there being a gap in player skill-sets and perhaps too a flaw in the way the game is being officiated, as the odds seem heavily stacked in favour of the attacking team.
But the driving maul is an administrative problem. It operates under a set of laws which are inconsistent and incongruous with the basic ethos of how the game is played.
If rugby bosses wanted the driving maul kicked out, it would take the most basic tweak to get it done.
As Smith says, if teams didn’t get the throw to the lineout when they kicked a penalty to touch, the rolling maul would die.
No one would bother with it. But better still, let teams kick the ball into touch, but change the law to say there is no such thing as a maul anymore.
Remove the maul and with it, no one will be able to be in front of the ball and the ball carrier without being deemed to be offside or obstructing.
Likewise, these ridiculously long advantages that have become the norm can only be fixed at an administrative level.
Referees are allowing them to go on for as long as they do because that’s how they have been asked by their respective bosses to interpret the law.
Someone at the highest level of authority needs to reset everyone’s thinking about what constitutes an advantage and for the new thinking to be decidedly less generous than the current regime of allowing teams to hold the ball for 10 phases, advance 40 metres and still be playing under advantage.
The administrators can deal with the inconsistency issue, while the referees can be tasked with getting a handle on their pedantry.
There was a time when referees were focused only on penalising the clear and obvious, but many have returned to seeing something small, technical and not important at every collision and penalty counts per game have far outstripped inflation in the last year or so.
As for the conspiracy element, that’s on the South Africans to clean up.
Rassie Erasmus. Photo / Photosport
Springbok director of rugby Rassie Erasmus strangely suggested in 2019 that the All Blacks had used their decade-long status as the best team in the world to win favourably refereeing outcomes.
Then in 2021 he infamously broadcast his belief that his team was unfairly refereed out of the first test against the British and Irish Lions
And now former coach Nick Mallett has suggested that the Boks’ record would have been better in the last four years, but for unfair refereeing.
“There were a number of games last year we should have won and we didn’t for some refereeing reasons,” he said on SuperSport’s Final Whistle.
“Had the referees been absolutely fair, we would have ended up winning a couple of games.”
Rugby has problems, but manifestly corrupt refereeing is not one of them and South Africa are not victims of any conspiracy designed to unfairly topple them as world champions.
That so many key rugby figures in South Africa promote this idea of inequity as a means to explain Springboks defeats is as predictable and as boring as them kicking to the corner and rolling the maul.
