Johnny Nic on rugby: Traditional game under threat
A few weeks ago I wrote about how ever shorter forms of cricket are undermining the traditional county game and five-day Tests, feeling that they are so far from the original spirit of cricket that they ought not to share its name.
Well, the desire to produce quick, flashy, noisy games isn’t limited to cricket any more. Now rugby risks going exactly the same way with something called World Series Rugby which began last week in Australia.
It involves matches played by Western Force in Perth, against the three Pacific islands, Hong Kong, the Rebels and the Crusaders.
It sounds a little out-of-the-way and obscure but is it? Could it be the seeds being sown for a whole new form of the game, designed to drum up more customers from those who find ‘traditional’ rugby, slow, fragmented and boring?
I think it’s a worrying development but World Rugby has already given its approval for a series of law changes to be adopted for this series, with the aim of speeding up the game.
OK, are you ready for these doozys?
It allows for rolling substitutions, up to 12 per side! Scrums will have to be completed in a single minute or the team considered responsible for holding up play will be penalised. So you have to get down and chuck the ball in ASAP. Line-outs will be taken when the throwing team is ready, regardless of whether a line has been formed. So basically, there won’t be line-outs as such, it’ll likely be more like a soccer throw-in.
It is obvious that these changes are being made to speed everything up and reduce in the in-game admin in general.
There will also be a ‘power try’ which will be worth seven points, with another two from the conversion. The power try will be awarded if the continuous move starts in the scoring team’s 22. There will even be a green light on the goal posts which will flash if a power try is on. Psychedelic, huh? Again, this is clearly designed to excite the crowd because hey, who doesn’t like a flashing green light?
Do you find this all a bit dispiriting? To my mind, it all sounds like fast food, compared to a traditional roast dinner. Surely the exciting parts of the game are in part exciting because of the more passive passages of play. You can’t just fillet out the ‘exciting’ bits and expect it to be somehow even more thrilling. It all exists within the whole, one dependent on the other.
Trying to contrive a kind of heavy metal version of the game overlooks the fact that rugby is a lot more than just scoring tries.
So will this be of interest to rugby fans? In a way, as something of a traditionalist, I hope not. However, we’ve always had an open speedy, truncated version of the game. I played in my schools sevens team and it was great fun, though utterly exhausting if you got to the latter stages of the tournament. It was fast and manic and over quickly.
Obviously, the World Sevens Series already exists, so for fans who like their rugby to be more instantly gratifying, isn’t that enough? Do we really need a new plastic version of the game?
The thinking behind this new game is that non-rugby followers could be enticed to watch it if games contain more action and fewer set-pieces like scrums and line-outs.
Obviously, the sweet candy of more tries being scored is designed as a carrot to keep the non-aficionado’s attention. All of which, I guess I can accept except for one thing: It’s not rugby, is it? It’s something else, so call it something else. If you’re removing a lot of elements that make rugby rugby, then you’re not playing rugby, are you? At best it sounds like a rugby-flavoured new sport.
But, even if we don’t like it, as we’ve seen in cricket, there is a cultural swing towards these shortened forms of games.
As attention spans seem to be in permanent decline amongst increasing numbers of people, maybe people like me, who are happy to watch 80 minutes of stop-start rugby in the full knowledge that it is that very nature of the game that provides the ebb and flow of excitement, maybe we’re becoming a minority.
But hey, look! A flashing green light! Whoo hoo!!