Take away the scrum penalties for being overpowered as in the old days…..allow the maul to be pulled down….go back to no hands in the loose scrums….stop lifting in the line outs making the line outs more of a contest …reduce the penalty and drop scores to 2.
Almost every change in the rules have made it easier for the defensive team to rely on kicking and set pieces to win the game, rather than tries
Just thinking of the England game again, the eventual World Champion Boks were nearly knocked out by a pretty poor international side that simply refused to play any rugby, kicking the ball 41 times and not breaking the line even once. That's what the game seems to reward now.
If you are ahead, it makes sense to hoof the ball out of your half.
I have no problem with hoofing the ball if you are inside your 10 meter line. It’s the barrage of up and unders launched from close to half way that just beg for a back line movement.
Shows once again Rassie knew exactly what he was doing.
As I said about Ireland and the French. They got no change out of our backline. Yes they look fancy with their clever passes, loops, chop kicks, twinkle toes etc but how ecfective were they.
Our skills were hopeless undervalued by the arm chair critics who imagines they understood far more about rugby than our brilliant Bok coach. Some of Rassie's unhinged critics proved that they were way, way off. In fact planks like Doos and Mozzz were left red faced under a mountain of EGG!
Imagine being so daft as to give Du Toit a 3 rating when he was MKMand equalled the record of 28 tackles made at a RWC.
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Imagine not scoring one point for 45 minutes when a man up. We don’t know who would have won the game, barring the red card.
I’m pretty sure the AB’s kicked it as much as we did
And we should have scored in the second half - that Kolisi fluff was a huge fuck up
With Fourie at hooker our scrum was nullified so we were never going to achieve dominance from set pieces and those wet conditions prevented any form of taking advantage of the one man down
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This article on Planet Rugby indicates that throughout the RWC knockouts, the team that played the most with ball in hand lost.
This is not a good look for the sport. If everyone shifts their focus to defensive structures and playing safe to avoid turnovers and errors, mind-numbing kickathons like the SA/England game may well become the norm.
The Boks kicked 75% of their possession away against the All Blacks in the final, according to the article - more than in any other game in 2023.
What to do? How can the advantage be given back to teams who want to play the beautiful game versus the grinders who bunker down behind a barrage of box kicks?