yeah the biggest problem is that it’s very subjective where the side and front of the maul is. As the maul swings around, the side presumably becomes the front, but at what point does that occur? My interpretation of that is probably different to the refs therefore I get penalised for coming in the side, when a fraction of a second later and I’d have been deemed perfectly legal.

yes there were mauls before these rules came in. THey could be collapsed but they were still used as laws allowed blockers in front of the ball carrier. As they became more common, there were very shrill calls, mainly in the northern hemisphere, about how deadly collapsing a maul would be. I remember reading an article by Stephen Jones about how he would pull his sons out of rugby and stop coaching his son’s team because of the deadly danger he would be in if mauls were allowed to collapse. Since then it’s been shown to be utter rubbish. There have been virtually no injuries from the thousands of mauls that have collapsed at every level. A slow moving pile of bodies does not create any great problems as it comes to ground. Allowing collapsing would not remove mauls it would just stop them going for long. Teams would be forced to use the ball off the back of the maul rather than constantly driving onwards in the maul.

Yes I could live with that as long as one stoppage also meant use it.

Indeed the breakdown penalties killed the Chiefs. But I’m a tad confused how a team which had barely been penalised at the breakdown all year suddenly became so completely undisciplined. I went back and looked at these penalties. The first was justified although Taukeiaho was pinned in the ruck, his position did enable Retallick to steal the ball. The second was not justified. Again Taukeiaho was pinned but this time he did not impede the ball coming out. If the ref had been better positioned he would have seen this and waved play on. a few minutes later the Chiefs appealed for a similar penalty and the ref said “no he’s pinned there”. This pattern continued throughout the game. Just before the missed forward pass, Will Jordan is tackled. Nankevill gets his hands on the ball and lifts it. Jordan on the ground grabs it again and places it back for the halfback. No penalty. In the final minute, almost the exact same scenario leads to a Crusaders penalty. I believe that Mr O’Keefe was determined not to be swayed into home team bias by the crowd and unfortunately he therefore swayed the other way. He was annoyed early by the Chiefs and therefore came down heavily on them. The classic example of this was when Scott Barrett took a Chiefs lineout by jumping directly in the Chiefs line. There could hardly be a clearer example of jumping across. No penalty. Retallick complained and is told “that’s enough from you Brodie” and the Chiefs are given a formal warning for talking to the ref. I don’t usually subscribe to the theories about refs influencing games but in this tight game he did have an undue impact, partly shown by the heavy penalty count against the Chiefs. It’s interesting that Mr O’Keefe has come out and noted some of the things “he needs to work on”.

Yes of course! They knew the Chiefs were going to do it because they’d never done it all year, therefore it was inevitable. Perhaps their coaching should have focused on stopping it rather than pointing it out to the refs? I nominate this comment for the “stupid comment of the week” award.

A pass is not designed to be contestable. In effect this is what an overthrown lineout is, a pass into the backline, bypassing the forward contest. To run a move like this successfully you need it to be slick and fast. If you just want possession then throw it to your best jumper in the lineout, but if you want to catch the opposition with a speedy move then fling it directly to a fast back – just make sure he starts onside.

Super rugby in any form is not the solution to RA problems. Super rugby needs to be a pinnacle not a pathway. The solution is pathways to the top and a successful mid tier tournament. The NRC was on the right track but RA didn’t give it the chance to develop.

The only rule in play is where he starts as the ball is thrown. The lineout was closer to a metre from the 10 m line and he was a metre in from half way. Ergo 8 metres. When the ball crosses the 15m line is irrelevant. He can advance when the ball is thrown. Yes the AR should have picked it up but I consider the ARs had as poor a game as the ref. Angus Gardiner called the silly in from the side of the maul against Tau’keiaho when he didn’t even make contact with the maul and no one saw the forward pass.

Mauls would not disappear if you could pull them down. They just wouldn’t go for as long. They’d be a good way to suck in defenders and pin them in the collapse before releasing the ball.

League has no more open running play than rugby. One big guy running five metres into three other big guys is not open running rugby and that’s what 90% of league is.

Nah I hate it when my team does it too.

I didn’t say that. I said it didn’t require precision and finesse and was staid and mundane.

Agreeing. Adding value! LOL

Yep the Brumbies’ maul got stopped. They weren’t actually very good at it in spite of the hype around them doing it. Lets look at players in the same team which was good at it – the Crusaders. Lester Fai’unganuku topped the overall try scoring with 13. Codie Taylor usually played only 50 minutes of each game but he still scored 12.

I think he’s meaning Tier 2 as in the level below international, the top tier of club competition.

Actually having preliminary rounds to remove the bottom teams is pretty common. It happens regularly at the Olympics in events like rowing, shot put, hammer throw etc etc. There will be something like 12 or 14 entries and they will have early rounds to remove the worst competitors and run a final with the 8 or 10 best. I’ve seen events where the early rounds are designed to remove only one team. Rowing eights is often like that.

This type of pool system has been tried and frankly it was a mess. The games people really wanted to see never happened and some teams got way easier paths to finals without playing any hard games etc etc. Not really a good model for a complete competition.

The NZ super rugby teams do represent regions. These would be the names if you called them after that region. Upper North Island Blues, Middle North Island Chiefs, Lower North Island Hurricanes, Upper South Island Crusaders, and Lower South Island Highlanders. There’s some inspiring names for you to invoke some raging tribalism!
The provincial names were removed after the first two years because they excluded and alienated most of the fan base. Why would we want to go back to excluding them?
Justin has only had 25 years to get his head around the fact that the provincial names are gone from the NZ teams. How many more years do you think it will take for him to get it right?

The ball could be lobbed out there but you open yourself up to the opposition getting there first or at the same time. It really only works for a line break like on Sat night if it’s done at extreme pace.

All the time? How on earth do those hookers score all those tries then?

Yeah not sure most of these points are workable.
Starting with reducing the teams in the finals. While this seemed like a problem at the beginning you just have to look at 1st vs 8th to see that it actually worked. Reds almost knocked over the Chiefs. Your solution would end with three games rather than seven. I loved the quarterfinals and an extra week of good rugby. Two of the quarterfinals were brilliant matches which would not have occurred under your solution.
Bring back the Auckland Blues and Waikato Chiefs etc? Yeah nah. Are you aware how many provinces make up these teams? The Chiefs are made up of players and fans from Waikato, Taranaki, Bay of Plenty, King Country, Counties-Manakau and Thames Valley Sure you might get more parochialism from Waikato fans but how would Taranaki or Bay of Plenty fans react to the Waikato Chiefs? They would hate them, just like they hate Waikato. How would Hawkes Bay or Manawatu fans like the Wellington Hurricanes? Again they’d hate them. Not even a remote option. While we’re on this, can someone talk to Justin Harrison and stop him from using these ancient names, please? They exclude a massive chunk of the fan base of each team. Tribalism would only work for about a 5th of the tribe you’re trying to appeal to. The other 4 /5ths would walk away and support another team.

you are ignoring the fact that companies are not currently lining up to sponsor rugby clubs therefore it is incumbent on you to provide evidence that this would change in a different model. It is not incumbent on me to show that your
model would not work as current practice already shows it won’t.
But we do have an idea what broadcasters are prepared to pay for rugby content because there is a highly popular rugby competition in Australia already which is being bid for by broadcasters. You can’t compare to AFL which is a different market for a bigger population and viewing audience, but you can compare to NRL and get a vaguely realistic figure based on what the NRL gets, which is currently $115m per year. No idea where your $1.050 billion figure comes from. Remember that this NRL money has to be divided among 16 teams which equals approx $7m each while currently the $40m is divided among 5 SR teams so approx $8m each. Not sure how you can justify rugby broadcasting deals ever getting better money per team than NRL.
There’d be nothing left from broadcasting deals to pay the owners anything.

But who is going to pay your $210 million? No one. It’s certainly a pluck as there’s no broadcasting organization that would fork out this sort of money. You could perhaps pluck a vaguely realistic figure based on what the NRL gets, currently $115m per year but this is for a currently massively popular product, not an untried product with barely any fan base for the clubs. You’d be lucky to get $40m for what you’re proposing. Remember too that the NRL money has to be divided among 16 teams which equals approx $7m each while currently the $40m is divided among 5 teams so $8m each assuming the national bodies take none of it… So actually the SR teams are better off than NRL teams from their broadcasting deal. Not sure how you can justify rugby broadcasting deals getting better money per team than NRL, and none of that money goes back to sponsors or team owners.
There’d be nothing left of your $10m to pay the owners anything.

this is simply silly reasoning, the ridiculous slippery slope argument. It’s like saying legalising single sex marriage will eventually lead to legalising pedophilia, which was the most common argument against single sex marriage. Has any slippery slope argument ever come true? It’s possible NZ might ask Australia to go down to 3 teams, the ones representing the three traditional powerhouses of Australian rugby NSW, Qld and ACT. Anything lower than this is stupidity.

If this lifting of their profile was so valuable, then companies would be doing it already. But other than Fortescue, they’re not doing it. Any rugby club which attracts a significant sponsor can consider themselves lucky to have done so. Finding a company to put in vastly more money to actually own the club would be beyond lucky! There also isn’t significant broadcasting income to be shared. Every cent of broadcasting income is needed to keep the game going. You need to find more than one example to say that this model would even get close to a start.