Rugby – the rules must change!
[Photo nicked from the Telegraph]
No, no, no, no!
Maybe it was the time spent in Australia or maybe my character but it seems to me that William Webb Ellis ran the ball, he didn’t opt to kick it.
This comment is not nice to English ears but you know me – attack my own first and get the house in order before attacking the enemy and IMHO, this is just and justified from some commenter at the Telegraph:
Here you mouthy english go again. Gob gob gob. The whole of the team is crap, including all the backroom staff. Over-rated. Cannot play the game correctly, i.e. by scoring tries. It’s ALWAYS kick kick kick! That rule should be struck from the game. [JB]
Absolutely! Brian Moore, you’ll recall, was moved to a rit of fage over this kick, kick, kicking. There’s a place for the kick – the conversion or drop goal but the penalty should be reduced to 1 point. And see how far it’s got into the English blood – another commenter:
JB, as an obvious student of the game, you should be aware that the object of the game is to kick goals. Tries are just one means of doing this (and rightly rewarded higher than other means), but they are not the point of the game.[PP]
No – the aim of the game is NOT to kick goals, it’s to score points, you *&^%^&*!!!!
The problem is not the English per se – they’ve always been alternatively safety conscious and bold when needed – the problem is in the rules. The English will stop kicking for touch when the rules make it less of an advantage – let’s say a try is worth 3 if it follows a kick for touch and 6 if it begins from the back half in a sequence, even if turned over and regained. That could be the linesmen’s/scorers’ job to see rather than the referee’s, to make it easier on him.
For Union to live again and approach League as a spectacle, along with all the ways it’s better than League anyway, the rules must change. Before you know it, people might even turn to football and then where would civilized people be? Rooney and other deadheads as cult heroes?
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I disagree James, kicking is a part of the game too, all the teams are playing to the same rules so I don’t see the problem. RU is a game of strategy and opting to kick is a part of that.
No one is ever worried when other nations kick their way to victory, it’s only when England are winning that there’s talk of cutting the penalty points, like when Wilko was banging them over.
We’ll agree to disagree on this. It’s not strategic kicking now and then which is bad – it’s the automatic use of kicking to touch as a way up the field which galls the purist.
James Higham recently posted…Why rugby is vastly better as a national game
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/rugby-union/21390799
JD recently posted…Why rugby is vastly better as a national game
It’s the use of the specialist kicker as against running the ball thats out of kilter, with the amount of points on offer for minor infringements the Wilkinsons of the rugby world can win a game on their own thats not to deride the skill involved but to a non rugby fan just a casual observer it is a very boring way of winning.
By the way James for some strange reason I have at a distance followed rugby league and the Australian test team that toured here about three years ago were way and above anything in both codes that I have seen , magnificent.