Law discussion: Seven small changes World Rugby could make to stop referees deciding so many Tests
Referee Ben O'Keefe and an inset of a maul during Springboks v Scotland.
The game is quicker than it has been in a decade and better officiated than at any point in our lifetimes, and it still finds an extraordinary number of ways to stop itself.
Seven small changes, all pulling the same way; fewer penalties, faster ball, 15 men left on the field, and a referee asked for far fewer decisions that settle the result on their own.
The top line is that rugby’s problems are almost never problems of ambition. They are problems of interruption.
World Rugby’s own trial data had ball-in-play climbing past 33 minutes a match once the dead time around conversions and lineouts was trimmed, and the sport has spent the same period quietly inventing new reasons to reach for the whistle and the pocket.
The group that gets least attention in all this is the referees. Every sanction the game has made more severe puts another decision in the referee’s hands that can settle a Test rather than shape it, and in a close match he may be asked for three or four of that type of call.
Nobody is asking referees to be right less often, only to spend less of their working life adjudicating events where being marginally wrong is unrecoverable.
The marginal call no longer ends in the pub either. It is clipped, captioned and served to an audience with an appetite for a villain, and unions have spent several seasons condemning the abuse of match officials whilst leaving intact the sanction structure that guarantees there will be something to abuse them about.
By and large, refereeing is at its highest standard in history but, sadly, so is the accompanying fan and pundit scrutiny, and our changes are designed to assist them as much as possible.
Take the three points out of the scrum
The scrum is the only part of rugby where a three-point swing can be awarded for something almost nobody in the ground saw, including several of the men doing it. Early engagement, a hinge, a shoulder dropping, a loosehead boring in at an angle no camera can prove, all of it adjudicated by one official crouched at knee height with the worst sightline in sport. Make those offences a free kick and a tight Test stops being settled by a scrum on halfway that had nothing to do with the ball.
Two serious objections come back, both from people who referee or coach scrums rather than watch them. The first is definitional; almost every scrum offence is technical, so why is a wheel any less technical than a tighthead cranking his opposite number’s arm? Fair hit, and the answer is to stop using the word technical altogether. Binds, angles, heights, hinges and wheels are the contest going wrong, and they become free kicks. Collapsing whilst going backwards to kill a five-metre attack, or declining to push at all, is a refusal to have the contest, and stays a full penalty.
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The second is sharper. If a scrum offence costs only a free-kick, a coach under pressure concedes one at every scrum, picks lighter forwards, and the set-piece stops being worth investing in. That argument contains its own answer, which is to restore the option removed under Law 20.3 in July 2024. Let the side awarded a free-kick at a scrum choose another scrum. It arrived eight months after Damian Willemse called a mark in his own 22 against France and asked for a scrum, and was promptly nicknamed the Willemse law by everybody except the officials, who insisted the Springbok pack had nothing to do with it.
Give it back and a pack intending to concede at every scrum packs down again, and again, going backwards with the clock running. Strong scrummaging keeps its reward and gets a better one in possession and territory, and persistent offending still meets the escalation to a penalty and a card. The 2008 ELVs made most offences free kicks and the northern hemisphere front row treated it as an assault on the family silver. It deserves a second hearing, this time with the scrum option attached.
The advantage that punishes twice
A side infringes, the referee signals advantage, the attack goes wide and scores in the corner. Seven points. Then the whistle goes back, the replay comes up and the offender collects 10 minutes on top. The team has been punished in the only currency the sport recognises, and then again in one that ruins the next quarter for everybody watching.
If the try is scored on advantage, no card. Keep cards for foul play and the professional foul that stops a try, which is what the sanction was built for. The current position asks a referee to rule that an offence both failed to prevent a try and was serious enough to cost a man, two findings that sit awkwardly together, and to do it while the conversion is being teed up. Few sides ever come back from moments like this and it kills the contest, often through marginal technicality.
Deliberate knock-ons should depend on geography
A hand thrown out to intercept a scoring pass on your own line is arguably worth 10 minutes. There is none at all that the same fingertip on halfway, with three defenders inside and the cover tracking across, is worth the same, yet the sanction barely flexes.
Restrict the yellow to offences inside the 22. Outside it, penalty and get on with it. Yes, that is a cliff edge, and a hand a metre outside the 22 will be treated differently from the same hand a metre inside. Rugby is full of cliff edges already, the 50:22 and the goal line among them, and a line everybody in the ground can see beats a discretion that currently costs eighty thousand people four replays of a man’s little finger.
Bind on entry, and make it visible
The clearout is the most dangerous unpoliced act in the game. Players arrive at speed, off their feet in all but name, shoulder first and hands tucked, and the contact is legal-ish because the law asks for a bind nobody can see and no referee can adjudicate at that pace. Make it explicit and demonstrable on entry, in the way the latch was tidied up, and the man with the whistle gets a test he can actually apply.
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The sanction matters as much as the test: no visible bind is a free-kick, and only the contact that was already dangerous stays a penalty or a card. Quicker ball may follow, though I would not promise it, because a compulsory bind could as easily produce a longer wrestle. The case stands on safety without it.
Give the long lineout throw a reason to exist
Here is a genuine oddity. Under Law 18 the lineout ends the moment the ball is thrown beyond the 15-metre line, and once it ends the backs parked 10 metres away are free to come forward. So the one throw guaranteed to create space, the flat missile over the tail to a runner arriving at pace, hands the defence ten metres of free line speed as its reward. Which is why you see it roughly twice a season, usually from a French side, mostly Toulouse, who rarely give a Gallic shrug over such law intricacies.
Keep the offside lines alive when the throw goes beyond 15 metres. A five-man lineout then carries a real long option, defences have to keep bodies honest, and the corridor stays open for the phase that follows. It costs nothing, endangers nobody and creates space where the modern game has none.
Close the maul once it has formed
No player may join a maul after the maul has been called. That single line would do more for the tempo of the last 10 minutes of a Test than any shot clock.
At present the five-metre maul is an eight-man wheelbarrow race in which the hooker claims a try he last had sight of four metres earlier, and the defence can only concede, collapse it illegally, or be shoved backwards while the clock runs down. Freeze the numbers at formation and it becomes a skill contest again, resolved quickly, with the ball emerging to backs who still have something to attack.
It takes a decision off the referee too. A good share of the penalties at a driving maul are awarded for offences committed by men who arrived after the thing was already moving, and the defending side is regularly punished for the only response left to it. Close the maul at formation and most of that disappears, because there is nobody late to police and no reason to pull it down.
The objection is that an attack would load bodies in at formation while the defence is still arriving. It cuts both ways, because the freeze falls on the referee’s call for both sides at once, and a defence that does not fancy the arithmetic keeps the option it has always had, which is to decline the engagement and tackle the man holding the ball.
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No reward for the choke
The choke tackle was Ireland’s gift to the game around the 2011 World Cup and as defensive coaching it was excellent, despite predictably failing to get them past a quarter-final. Oh well.
But as a law, it is an incentive to stop rugby being played. Hold a man up, wait for the whistle, take the scrum, buy 60 seconds and reset the line. Holding a big carrier upright and away from the ball is a real defensive skill. The reward for it is the problem, because it arrives as a stoppage rather than as a turnover earned in open play.
It is coached now as a clock tool as much as a turnover tool. A defence three points up with five minutes left will take a held-up tackle over a completed one every time, because the whistle is worth more to it than the ball is.
So call held and play on, with the ball to be made available immediately. No scrum, no reset, no 60 seconds. The choke then becomes what it was originally, a way of stealing possession from a careless carrier, rather than a legitimate method of running down a clock while the crowd checks its phones.
That is the list, and none of it is hard to implement or even remotely controversial, and all changes would augment speed of game. The common thread is interruption and consequence rather than softness. Everyone keeps the contest and removes the stoppage built around it, or reduces what a single marginal decision is worth.
The mechanism is the slow part rather than the ideas; the brake foot and the 20-minute red card only became full law on 1 July this year, after three seasons of closed trials, global trials and Council review, which is the journey any of the seven would face.
