Boring, boring England

The managers of the Guinness Premiership are betraying how boring they are, and also to a large extent their underlying ignorance.

They are, almost to a man, complaining that the ELVs are penalising attacking play, but actually what is penalising attacking play is the IRB's ruling on interpreting the law about off the feet at the ruck. This is NOT part of the ELVs but presumably the coaches are too stupid to realise the difference, or think we are.

As for whether the referees are doing a good job or not - it strikes me that the players going forward are much more likely to go off their feet than those in defence, at least after the first one or two, because the others run back, balance and go forward into the ruck, arriving later than the attacking players who have probably charged to get there, not paused for balance and consequently do go over the top. I'm not saying the referees are perfect, but I rather suspect they're doing a reasonably fair job of what they see.

But the Northern Hemisphere ELVs are different too. In particular, they've kept penalties for everything. What does this mean? Well, they've kept the penalties, so there are still a lot of kicks at goal for points, and a lot of lineouts. Of course the change in numbers at the line out law (which is an ELV) is meaning that putting in, particularly to attacking lineouts is not working as well as it used to, but that's not stopping the old reflex of go for the corner and when it does, it just means they kick for points... and the game is not flowing and running and attractive, it's slow, and structured and then disrupted and everyone moans.

There seems to be this belief that "Oh, that's worth a penalty" makes the SH ELVs unfair. What bollocks. If the laws of the game are changed to the ELVs (and if they are I hope it's the SH version) say that this is worth a free kick, and persistent offences can upgrade that to a penalty, then that's what they're worth. It's still fair to both sides as long as the laws are applied consistently, it's just different to how it's been done for the last few years.

Despite what the wingeing conservatives would have you believe, rugby has changed - and it usually changes to empower tries. In my lifetime we've had a few changes for safety (like stopping collapsing rucks, and the changes to the scrum to make that hopefully safer), and we've changed the points for a try from 4 to 5 to try and encourage more tries. We've changed the typical league points system several times too... it used to be 2 for a win, 1 for a draw, 0 for a loss, like football. But we changed to bonus points for 4, 6, and I think it was 8 tries, and then down to only for 4 or more tries, and for a small loss...

If we go back to the 30's and through until after the war I think, rugby was decided on the number of goals, be that penalty goals, drop goals or what we'd now call a conversion. The reason they're called tries? Because it gave you the right to try for a goal.

Contrary to the gripes of the boring commentators and boring coaches, rugby can't exist in a vacuum. It does rely on the support of the fans. The SH rules are producing a far more entertaining game on average. I'm not saying the old rules couldn't, but they often didn't - the SH ELVs still produce dull games too, but typically they're more exciting. They're faster, but they still have all the old elements, just in different proportions. How does this reduce the skill level of the game? The fact that they're faster means the players have to make decisions faster and under more pressure. This is supposed to make them more stupid somehow?

Admit it: you're boring old farts that don't like change because you're grey conservatives. Not all change is good, but if you're going to criticise the changes try to have something sensible to say about them that stands up to even simple analysis.