In our second chat with the men in charge, Ruck Tales looks at the technical side of the game: where the issues occur and how the evolution of the laws of the game are impacting on how we play.
Ruck Tales (RT): What are the most common rugby law
infractions committed in Finnish games?
Ref 1: The most common
laws infractions occur at the breakdown. Coaches are getting better at ensuring
that their players release both the ball and the ball carrier, but both remain
a problem. Added to that, players frequently leave their feet in an effort to
secure the ball and those already on the ground often fail to make the effort
to roll away.
Ref 3: Definitely post-tackle situations - tacklers not rolling away and the tackled player not
releasing the ball. It used to be high tackles three or four years ago, and this has improved.
Ref 2:
Offsides at the breakdown (rucks/mauls), and of course knock-ons. Tip-tackling
is creeping in more and more these last few seasons as well.
(The eye of the storm: refs are very aware of potential infringements at rucks and mauls)
RT: The
scrum is the iconic image of rugby, but between the diminished importance of
the feeding rule and the new IRB law variations for quick lineouts for certain knock-ons, we feel
it is slowly being sidelined. What are your thoughts on this?
Ref 3:
At top level way too much time is spent and lost on resetting scrums. It is certainly an iconic image of the game, with the pack in such a close
encounter, but IRB heads do realise it’s an injury hotspot (and therefore costly for
insurance) and tends to eat spectacular game time away. At our level, it’s not
abused yet.
Ref 2: I
agree it has to be officiated heavily due to the safety issues involved, but I’m hoping it doesn’t go down the rugby league route and become
meaningless due to continual tampering.
Ref 1: I don’t agree with your take on the trial law amendments. The feed is
nearly always highlighted as an area to be policed more tightly ahead of every
major tournament, and while I would agree that there are many examples of when
crooked feeds have gone unpenalised, there has been no downplay of the
importance of ensuring a fair contest. One recent example of this is the new
engagement sequence to be trialled at the start of each nation’s next domestic
season; by replacing a referee’s command to 'engage' with an invitation to do
so reintroduces some of the contest that was originally lost once the
four-stage call was introduced a few years ago. Furthermore, in my opinion
allowing a team to take a quick lineout is a good way to keep play alive and to
give other options to teams. The scrum option hasn’t been removed from the
incident for those that want to capitalise on a stronger pack, but allows those
with a weaker pack a way to avoid turning over posession immediately to the
team that committed the error but have a heavy pack.
(Photo by Rod McCracken - Iconic: the scrum is one of rugby's centrepieces, but is it being marginalised?)
RT: Which
laws would you like to see changed/deleted/added?
Ref 1: The worst law I’ve ever seen was making pulling
down a rolling maul legal but thankfully that ELV never made it into full law.
What I would like to see concentrated on is creating a single interpreation
between hemispheres to avoid the situation where some actions are permitted in
one nation but not another. Having such grey areas isn’t fair to national sides
and it’s not fair to referees who are constantly being criticised when a
Northern hemipshere nation plays a Southern one for interpreting the law according
to the ethos in whichever hemisphere they were raised. I realise that this doesn’t apply so much to Finnish rugby but the laws are
evolving reasonably well.
Next week in the final part of Respect My Authoritaaaaaah! we conclude with a look at attitudes in the Finnish game and some of the more memorable moments witnessed by the officials.
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