New rules and new ideas do work

About a year ago, this column incurred the wrath of defendants and devotees of the schools' cups with a critical analysis of those hallowed competitions. Judging by the unusually hostile reaction to the notion that they be changed in any way - indicative of the resistance to change in so much of Irish rugby - to professionalism, the advent of the All-Ireland League, or changes to the interprovincials, or the AIL top-four play-offs - it was clear that in the context of Irish rugby the schools' cups constituted the mother of all sacred cows.

The most virulent hostility to change understandably came from within schools' rugby and especially from Blackrock loyalists, hardly surprising as that peerless academy has garnered 63 Leinster Schools' Senior Cups as against 50 for the rest combined. Yet the debate continues, it even cropped up post-Lens, and there's no harm in that. Debate is healthy. Debate is good.

The schools' cups roll around again this week when Clongowes Wood, perhaps fittingly in the season that the schools' game lost one of its most exceptional characters in Vinny Murray, play Wesley College tomorrow. Inevitably, there will be afternoons of high tension and high drama in Donnybrook and elsewhere, in which the entertainment will be the equal of anything else which the season produces.

Yet clearly there is something wrong with a system that until recently was about the only conveyor belt of international talent in this country outside of Limerick, and most of all in an age-old, unchanged knock-out format. As was pointed out in these pages yesterday, the same elite trio of Blackrock, Terenure and Clongowes have won 21 of the last 24 Leinster Schools' Senior Cups. The threesome of PBC, CBC and Crescent have won the last 14 Munster Cups, and the duo of St Joseph's, Garbally and St Joseph's, Galway have won 16 of the last 18 Connacht Cups.

By any standards, these are self-perpetuating elites, and this cannot be healthy, particularly as so much of the emphasis is on the knockout competition and the pressure rugby this prompts.

It is true that the schools play generally a dozen or more friendlies and other competitions such as a Leinster Schools' League have been brought on board (though without the likes of Blackrock, which rather diminishes its stature). So why not keep the Leinster Senior Cup, with it's knock-out finale of a last four or last eight, but introduce a home-and-away round robin format of two groups of six/eight schools?

Such a system exists in, say, Sydney, followed by a trial match between the best of each section. This ensures the same amount of exposure for all players, with each school guaranteed 10/14 quality cup games a year, in a less pressurised atmosphere.

It's no coincidence that the knock-out emphasis of Irish schools' rugby contributes to relatively successful under-age sides, but likewise it's probably no coincidence that this hasn't been manifested at adult level.

The best sporting academies in the world, be it the Australian sports institute or Ajax Football Club, couldn't care less about under-age results, but instead the focus of attention is on developing individual skills. I'm not suggesting we throw the baby out with the bath water, just look to retain what's best about the schools' cups while modifying them to the benefit of the young players themselves.

On a broader front, the anti-climactic World Cup also prompted a widespread debate as to how the game can be freed up and more space created, prompting the International Board's decision on Friday to make significant changes to the tackle, scrum and line-out on Friday.

"We had to try and create more space, the pitch had become too cluttered," admits Lee Smith, the bright and deep-thinking Kiwi who coaches UCD but, as his day job, is the Game Development Manager of the IB.

In tackle situations, defending players will only be allowed to challenge for possession by joining the contest "behind" the player nearest to their own goal line who is involved in the tackle. In theory at any rate, this should reduce the number of stoppages and the number of times players go to ground while struggling for the ball.

The reduction of line-out restrictions regarding "peeling off" ought to create more attacking options. The badly needed and fairly radical change to the scrums, effectively applying the "use it or lose it" principle which exists for mauls, will at a stroke deny number eights the opportunity of running down the clock in deliberate time-wasting, reducing the numbers of reset scrums and speeding up the game at scrum time.

However, it is the advent of sin-binning which is liable to provide the most striking change for Six Nations' viewers. Studies of the 10-minute sin bin in the Super 12s have shown that it has curtailed deliberate cheating and foul play. They have also shown that teams reduced to 14 men usually concede a score. In part this is the result of being a man down, but also because it prompts a less free-wheeling approach to the laws from the remaining 14 for fear of being reduced to 13 players.

As it provides referees with an alternative to the effectively useless yellow card, this law change to the Six Nations is liable to provoke more debate than any other change. As Bob Dwyer correctly forewarned on Saturday: "You should have a sin bin but it should be used primarily to force people who don't want to play the game properly off the pitch. It shouldn't be used as an `out' for referees. It's not there for half-foul play."

Nevertheless, it's interesting to note that the other victorious Australian World Cup coach, Rod Macqueen admitted that the Wallabies would not have played the same way had sin-binning been in effect for the World Cup.

And as one of those who felt that Jim Fleming was justified in persistently penalising France during the first half of the World Cup semi-final, and not strict enough on them in the second-half, intriguingly there was also a popular consensus that France would have been a victim of the sin-binning law had it been available to Fleming in that famous semi-final.

How differently might France have approached that first-half, and hence how differently might that game, and the World Cup, have panned out?