Demand for ELVs to be scrapped is worldwide

LAWMAKERS, REFEREES, coaches and players from around the rugby world are attending a two-day IRB seminar in the Lensbury Club in south London this week, and their recommendations are liable to have a more profoundly seismic effect on the game than any competition or match played in either hemisphere this season, writes GERRY THORNLEY

At stake are those cuddly little Experimental Law Variations (ELVs), 13 of which that have been on trial globally since August 1st. Most of the remaining 23 are being employed in the Super 14 while the rest have been sent back to the so-called Laws Project Group (LPG).

Many of the luminaries on the LPG, and other supporters of the ELVs within the IRB and the New Zealand and Australian unions, will come armed with a battery of statistics to show that the fuller raft of ELVs have achieved their primary aim of keeping the ball in play longer and making decisions less subjective to the whims of referees.

Opposing them, in the vast majority of cases, will be representatives of the European unions, also armed with a veritable arsenal of statistics, to show that the ELVs have bastardised the game in what has, unfortunately, become something of a north-south political stand-off.

The key points from the conference will then be considered by the IRB Rugby Committee when they meet on April 27th to formulate recommendations for the IRB Council meeting on May 13th.

The IRB Council will then decide which ELVs, if any, should be fully integrated into Law, with a two-thirds majority required in each instance. The volume of oppositions from the European unions, South Africa, Argentina, Canada and perhaps others are liable to knock the vast majority of the ELVs back.

It hasn’t helped the cause of the ELVs, or the game itself, that the IRB permitted the southern and northern hemispheres to go in two separate directions.

The Super 14 has run with the “sanctions” experiment, whereby the vast majority of offences deemed worthy of full penalties have been reduced to indirect infringements. The net effect has been something of a cheat’s charter, and a surfeit of tap-and-go penalties in a sort of homogenised form of rugby league.

Eddie O’Sullivan recently commented that he continues to tape the early morning Super 14 fare but is often not inclined to watch it. You can see where he’s coming from.

In Europe, the ELVs haven’t been helped by the IRB’s diktat on the eve of the season to penalise players going to ground to steal the ball.

One could understand why the IRB wanted to prevent a repeat of many last season’s endgames whereby the winning side, in possession, simply picked-and-jammed their way to the full-time whistle.

There is also some merit in the ELV to prevent teams bringing the ball back into their own 22 and kicking it out on the full. But with referees under orders to penalise players for going off their feet, and some did so more enthusiastically than others, suddenly the attacking teams became much more heavily penalised at the breakdown. Teams duly deduced it wasn’t worth the risk of attacking from deep or counter-attacking. Cue aerial ping-pong, though admittedly Juan Martin Hernandez and his fellow Pumas had already started a pre-ELV trend here.

Curiously, players are not being punished as severely for going off their feet in recent weeks while in France they seem to be blithely ignoring it judging by Eurosport’s weekly live match from the Top 14, with the result that the breakdown is frequently a messy, mass pile-up.

Watch it sometime, it’s a howl, and may partly explain their poor showing in the European competitions.

Similarly, the ELV to dilute the maul had some merit. Lest we forget, the maul had become a little too powerful, but such is the resulting lack of space nowadays that many games appear to be 20-a-side. Now the maul has assumed a nostalgic beauty which was not always the case, if for no other reason than it sucked in defenders.

Referees have not penalised teams for bringing mauls down from below the waist, though it is dangerous in any case. A simple solution would be to strictly enforce a use-it-or-lose-it rule, whereby if a team initiates a maul but the defending team stops it, then the attacking team must use the ball immediately or concede a scrum to the defending team. It would make the game safer, and ensure a degree of variety as well as space further out, while not loading the dice too heavily in favour of the attacking team.

Of course, there wasn’t a whole lot wrong with the existing laws, had one or two of them been enforced properly. Consider contrasting examples from the Six Nations: England v France in round four, and Wales v Ireland on the final weekend.

In the former the Australian referee Stuart Dickinson rigidly enforced the hindmost foot offside line and, hey presto, there was buckets more space. Wayne Barnes and his linesmen, like so many officials, did not enforce it, allowing both Wales and Ireland to creep forward from a position in front of the hindmost foot, with relative impunity. Result? Bouts of car crash rugby in midfield.

A pet hate, which happened to Chris Whitaker three times on Sunday, is the sight of defending players, already part of the ruck, sticking their hands out to spoil the scrumhalf’s pass from the base. To do this, the defending player invariably does so from an offside position, as he is not behind the hindmost foot.

This should be a yellow card offence every time, never mind a penalty. The mantra from the IRB and all referees should be: LEAVE THE SCRUMHALF ALONE! Likewise, all attempted one-handed intercepts, if they result in a knock-on, should be penalised with a full penalty. Merely conceding a scrum encourages them. One last thing to the southern hemisphere proponents of the ELVs. Keep the Australian chief executive John O’Neill quiet. He is not doing you any favours.