This week the South African rugby coaching team and back room staff took it on them selves to release a series of videos discussing the game of rugby. The series is called The Shape Of The Game and is worth watching if you love sport because they discuss the sport in a transparent way being open and honest. The reason behind this is a warranted genuine reason and that being World Rugby is having their annual meeting in two weeks time where they will discuss a globally aligned rugby calendar plus various law changes. The fear is that there is talk of removing the scrum from the game as we know it because teams are being dominated by SA even though it is a fair contest.
The talk is that there will be discussions about changing the scrum to it being similar to rugby league which is not what rugby union is about. Lets be honest this talk would not be happening if other teams were close to matching the SA dominance in this set piece. This has taken years for the SA coaching team to get right and the players in the scrum are specialist position players. If the laws change then their careers are over as they are no longer required as a different build of player being more athletic is now needed.
The number of scrums per game is not huge and averages about 6-7 per game and is a vital aspect of the game.
The SA coaching staff which also includes Jaco Peyper a retired rugby international referee start with the basics of rugby by discussing the rugby charter. The charter are a list of principles or a type of checklist ensuring the game is sticking to what is right for the sport and is inclusive for all shapes and sizes.
What I enjoyed about these discussions is they are showing World Rugby what they are proposing or preempting the law change discussions that this would go against the rugby charter. What was a worrying example by Jaco Peyper who was a top international referee is that they are given guidelines to referee using key performance indicators (KPI). One match which has stuck with him he has felt terrible about because he was forced to referee a certain way. The team who had scrum dominance was refereed out of the game and lost due to this refereeing tactic and stated the wrong team won. They have to reduce the number of resets when a scrum should have been reset instead of letting the play carry on when clearly it was wrong. This is a professional sport and when you penalize a team for being good at something is clearly wrong and the implications of losses affects sponsorship deals and revenue.
The problem with World Rugby is that law changes should be happening for safety reasons only and not because one particular team is dominating a certain aspect of the game. The other teams need to improve and laws should not be changed to level the playing field. This would be unfair and other sports have done this so this is not just a unique problem rugby has. Formula One saw regulation changes a few years ago that removed Mercedes dominance by changing the laws benefitting the other teams.
The number of kicks is actually decreasing and is not increasing per match. World Rugby will not like seeing these stats as they would have prepared a different story than what has been shown here.
The other talking point which goes back to the scrums again is the number of tactical kicking in the game which strangely enough once again is one of SA rugby's strong points with the contest in the air. World Rugby is saying this is leading to more scrums and they would rather the catching of the ball was not contested. The last law change saw fringe players having to move out of the way so there was no blocking which was fair enough as this was creating an unsafe zone where injuries could happen. There are fewer injuries with the contested ball in the air, but certain teams are better than others at this skill set and more often than not a scrum will be awarder to the kicking team due to a knock on. This is just smart game play management playing to your strengths knowing the weakness of the opposition.
I like how the SA coaching team has openly discussed this for all of world rugby to witness backed up by the relevant statistics for safety etc. This will force them to rethink whatever they were hoping to change in 2 weeks time because they cannot bluff bringing out their own statistics that have not been proven. Whoever is behind this is most likely the same person or group who manipulated the 2027 world cup draw favoring those who are not ranked 1 and 2 in the world. The crookedness and cheating going on is too obvious and this goes against the rugby charter for what the integrity of the sport stands for and it needs to be bought into the open.