French calls for rugby to speed up need brakes put on - and referees must step up
There are again more calls to speed the game up. This time it's the French. Speeding up the game makes, they say, for faster, more exciting rugby.
Well, perhaps. They would put a 30-second clock on scrums in order to speed up the formation. Delays at the scrum come usually when the referee isn't satisfied with something and delivers a lecture to the front rows. As I've said before and will doubtless say again, there are longer, and certainly less justifiable delays, in the formation of the line-out, and we don't need any law change or indeed a clock to deal with this.
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Hide AdOnly a referee should be prepared to compel players to get a move on.
Next comes a suggestion that kickers at goal should be allowed less time. At present it's 90 seconds for a conversion, 60 for a penalty: why the difference? Again, it's hard to see the need for a clock - though we do have one already. Once again it should be enough to have referees telling the kicker to get on with the job. Still with the clock, the French would seem to think that stopping it between the scoring of a try or, rather, the conversion attempt would deter players from wasting time.
All this seems a bit odd to me. This is partly because I don't think spectators at the ground are much concerned with these matters, except when one side does seem to be delaying the action for its own advantage. Then you may indeed hear someone shout "get a move on".
No, the more I think about these - and other calls to speed up the game - the more I suspect that the various proposals are advanced in the presumed interest of the television audience rather than the spectators, who have bought tickets and are sitting in the stands.
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Hide AdThese may mutter a bit, being disappointed by the show, but on the whole they with only one exception shrug the shoulder and let it go. These proposed changes, these calls for brighter rugby with fewer stoppages and delays are, I think, advanced in the supposed interest of the TV audience.
In TV terms, a rugby match is a product and the one thing a product must not be is dull. It must always hold the viewers' attention. If they experience a twinge or two of boredom they may switch off, even cancel their subscription. This may of course be ignorant of the tactics and strategy of the game.
I've some sympathy with such people. I often feel like that when watching football these days. I switched off a couple of Scotland's Euro matches early, because I was bored watching players in their own half with an immediate challenger hesitating, looking around, then sending a square pass to a colleague or even one back to the keeper who then rolled the ball out for the same slow-danced to resume. Still, even though bored, I didn't suppose that the answer was to tamper with the laws of the game in search of brighter football with less time-wasting.
Actually, the chief time-wasters in rugby are not the players but the officials. Some stoppages are of course necessary. The referee must stop play when an injured player requires attention. But the long conversations and sometimes arguments between the referee and the TMO are irritating.
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Hide AdCuriously this is seldom mentioned, perhaps because the repeated replays demanded by one or the other are of some compelling interest to the TV spectator, certainly more so than repeats on the big screen are to many spectators in the ground.
What is tiresome is, first, the referees reluctance to trust his own judgement and, second, the TMO’s readiness to call the referee's attention to a minor offence some passages of play before a try was scored, and this then being enough to have the try chalked off even those the marginally forward pass had no evident influence on the play.
I concede that we do need the TMO to draw attention to foul play, usually behind the referee's back - those can, and should, be notified in the first instance by the touch-judge or assistant referee as he is now called. As for the complaint that matches don't often open up in the later stages as they used to, this - while partly cause by the influx of substitutes - is also in part the result of long stoppages while referee and TMO discuss what has happened.
On the vexed question of substitutes, the French proposals to World Rugby look odd to me. They would permit a match squad of 25, not as now 23 players on the bench, but allow only six rather than eight (as now) substitutions to be made. By all means reduce the number of permitted substitutes but what is gained by having a handful of never to be used ones on the bench is a mystery to me.
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Hide AdThe French are not in favour of the 20-minute red card for foul dangerous play after which the offender can be replaced by a teammate. I remain doubtful about this. On the one hand it does seem right that the team as well as the player should suffer the consequences of foul play. On the other the imbalance may spoil the match for spectators. Perhaps a compromise is reasonable: 40 minutes before the replacement may come on if the if the foul came in the first half, 20 if it occurred in the second.
One thing we can be sure of, however, is that tinkering with the laws will go on and on, simply because they can never be perfect.
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