Another week, another set of ideas for how rugby union can be improved. Another year, another panoply of breathtaking matches, any one of which, if they had taken place in the distant amateur era, would be hailed by those “who were there” as legendary.
Last week Warren Gatland became the latest to offer his thoughts on how the game might move on. But in this age of social media incontinence we are never far from a thoughtless rant about how awful the game has become.
Last year, meanwhile, a casual glance through just the match reports this correspondent has written reveals yet more extraordinary displays of skill and drama. From Newcastle’s 40-point victory over the champions Leicester on the first weekend, through France v Scotland in the Six Nations, Leinster’s win over Toulouse, Wales v Fiji at the World Cup and one weekend in Paris that has already passed into legend – and it happened less than three months ago.
The quarter-finals of this year’s World Cup between New Zealand and Ireland on the Saturday and France v South Africa the next day were as good as any in the history of the event. The rugby was hailed by some, particularly the first half of the Sunday game, as the greatest ever played. A personal view is that, yes, they were astonishing, but also no more than the latest examples of a sport that seems to deliver weekend after weekend (viz the last couple of rounds of European rugby).
So why do we keep bemoaning the quality of the modern game? And, worse still, holding up the 20th‑century version as some sort of golden age when players were skilful and looked for space instead of contact?
It is difficult to evoke through words alone sufficient levels of contempt for the latter idea. Be in no doubt, all you nostalgists, rugby union was woeful in the amateur era. If you don’t believe that go back and watch it. All of it. From first whistle to last. And not that 101 Best Tries video your grandpa bought you for Christmas in 1987.
Admittedly, to watch an entire 80 minutes from the amateur era is not easy, but videos of them do exist on the internet. While researching Unholy Union, the book I wrote with Mark Evans a few years ago on where rugby has come from and where it is going, I sat through the entirety of the second and fourth Tests of the Lions tour to New Zealand in 1971, counting the key metrics such as scrums, lineouts and tackles.
And I did it twice. So no one else would have to.
There were slightly more set pieces (50-plus scrums, 50-plus lineouts) than there were tackles in both matches. It is worth pausing to consider that. The fourth Test in particular, a draw played out in blustery Auckland, was an incoherent mess of amateurs scrummaging, flapping, kicking, punching, elbowing, trampling and generally slip-sliding around. Sometimes with a ball somewhere near them. And we grew up being told what a legendary Test series that was.
Undoubtedly the biggest disadvantage the modern game has against the old days is levels of scrutiny. No one is trying to pretend every match nowadays is a thrill-fest. No sport anywhere has ever managed to magic away its dross.
The big problem now is that a person can watch six live matches a weekend on telly. A sport like rugby is laid bare, the brilliant never quite shaking off the stultifyingly bad. But just imagine if we were able to watch six live matches a weekend from the 1970s. That would be an experience to shake us from our nostalgia. That would do more for the popularity of the modern game than any tweak to the kicking laws.
The other problem is, perversely, how good everything is. Including and especially defences. Players in the modern game are immeasurably more skilful than their predecessors – of course they are, they’re full-time professionals – and they look for space all the time. It is just that there is so much less of it now.
There was footage of a try from some Welsh club match in the 1980s that did the rounds on social media a year or two ago. Nice simple handling down the line for a try in the corner, straight from a scrum. Beautiful skills executed simply.
And barely a defender in sight. The play may have started from a scrum, but those defenders arrived on screen one by one, as if each had been released sequentially from a cage on the touchline.
It is the modern game’s very excellence that would make such a try impossible today. Defences would never allow it. All the more extraordinary, then, that we see more spectacular tries in a season these days than any compiler could muster from the amateur era to fill a VHS for Christmas.
There is far less space in the modern game than there used to be last century, when you could throw a picnic rug over a pack of forwards as they marauded from set piece to set piece, from punch-up to punch-up. And so there are far more collisions, which throws up genuinely serious issues for the modern game to ponder.
But do not confuse that with players looking for contact over space. Or with a sport that has become boring and cynical. The opposite applies in both cases. Modern players are far nobler and more disciplined in the face of a more aggravating experience than their amateur predecessors, and they find far more space against more brutally constricting defences.
In short, they and their sport are far, far better than they ever were. Let us be careful what we wish for.
