18 tries at DPD Franklin’s Gardens on Saturday, a record opening weekend, and a league that averaged 3.2 tries a game across 2009/10 and 8.6 across last season.
We went through every number we could find to work out what’s driving the Prem’s try-fest, whether it’s good for the game, and what it does for England.
The top line
Ollie Sleightholme finished three tries, carried for 151 metres and beat 11 defenders as Northampton beat Bath 71-48 on Saturday, a game in which both sides had their try bonus point before half-time. The 18 tries and 119 points make it the second highest-scoring match in the league’s history, behind only Saints’ 94-33 win over Bristol in May.
The man in the middle was Matthew Carley, who usually referees with the all the warmth of a VAT inspector and spent the afternoon waving play on like a temporary steward directing traffic in a Glastonbury Festival car park.
18 tries is a freak result even by this season’s standards, but it sits on top of a trend that’s been building for three years, much to the delight of broadcasters and the quiet despair of defence coaches league-wide. The opening round produced 52 tries, the most of any opening weekend in the league’s history, and round two added 41, the highest two-round average in Opta’s records. Taking the regular season only, the climb looks like this:
– 2022/23: 7.01 tries per match
– 2023/24: 7.06
– 2024/25: 7.96
– 2025/26: 8.60
– 2026/27, first two rounds: 9.30
The lawbook opened the door
The two steps up after that plateau line up with World Rugby’s rewrite of the laws:
– July 2024: offside players must retreat from kicks rather than wait to be put onside, and the scrum option from a free-kick went
– November 2024: referees told to penalise escorts blocking chasers under the high ball
– 2025/26: the first Prem season with the global trials protecting the scrum-half at scrum, ruck and maul, and shot clocks on scrums, lineouts and conversions
Each one takes something away from a defence. The retreat law hands the catcher space to counter; the protected nine means cleaner, quicker ball at the base; and the escort clampdown has turned the box kick into a genuine contest, which produces far more of the broken-field possession modern attacks feed on. Super Rugby saw the same thing in 2025, when a penalty kick at goal came down from 68 seconds to 42 and tries went from 7.3 a game to 8.2.
Timing, though, isn’t proof, and the more revealing number is what teams do once they reach the 22. My great friend Sam Larner’s analysis of Oval Insights data early last season found Prem sides reaching the opposition 22 almost exactly as often as they did in 2021/22, 10.88 times a match against 10.91, but scoring a try from 35 per cent of those visits rather than 29, and 2.7 points per entry rather than 2.4. Larner puts that down to coaching rather than the lawbook, and Phil Dowson, after Saturday’s game, gave both their due: “There have been some rule changes from a kicking point of view that’s opened the game up,” he said, adding that “risk is being rewarded more often and there’s the actual skill level of the playing group.” So, in essence, the laws have opened up the space and the coaches have got a good deal better at using it. Our six measures on the opening round point the same way, with the side making fewer rucks winning all five matches.
The Newcastle effect
The Prem’s numbers also carry a large asterisk. Newcastle conceded 131 tries in 18 league games last season, up from 101 the year before, and matches involving them accounted for 38 of the 58 extra tries the league scored between those two seasons. Take Newcastle’s games out and the league average rose from 8.00 to 8.28, a modest 3.5 per cent, so a good share of the headline growth comes from fixtures against one side that couldn’t stop anybody. Newcastle had nothing to do with Saturday, of course, and that’s the second force at work, with the best attacking sides now scoring heavily against good teams too, even if Bath, with two players sin-binned, were some way short of their defensive best, Saturday’s 71 for 7 against Bath’s 48 all out being the latest scorecard.
Newcastle can’t explain the rest of English rugby, though. Last season the URC averaged 6.6 tries a game and the Top 14 7.5, against 8.6 in the Prem and 8.5 in Champ Rugby. The Prem has had no effective relegation since 2020/21, which takes away the trapdoor that would force the weakest side to fix its defence, but that can’t be the whole answer, because Champ Rugby still relegated Cambridge and London Scottish last season and scored at almost exactly the same rate. Something in English rugby is turning the dial, whether coaching, the spread of talent or the way the game has been refereed, and the evidence doesn’t yet separate them. Then there’s the calendar, with firm pitches and a dry ball in September flattering every attack in the league.
Is Test rugby following?
In direction, yes. The Six Nations averaged 5.27 tries a match in 2024, the last championship under the old laws, then 7.2 in 2025 and 7.4 this year, with 111 tries a championship record, and the Springboks and All Blacks shared 31 tries across the four Greatest Rivalry Tests at 7.75 a game. Test rugby sits about a try a game behind the Prem, because Test defences carry each country’s best defenders, face far fewer mismatches and play for margins tight enough to push coaches back towards territory and the boot.
A knife to a gun fight
Which brings us to England, who can both score tries and stop them. At this year’s Six Nations they scored 21 tries, second only to France, and conceded 18, one fewer than the champions, yet still finished fifth.
Paris told the story. England scored seven tries to France’s six and lost 48-46, the most points ever scored by a losing side in the championship. Add nine cards across the tournament, equalling Italy’s 2002 record, and Larner’s midway count of 1.8 points per visit to the 22, half the year before, and the picture is of a side that can play a shootout, but not yet manage one. What the Prem may not teach is how to keep the accuracy, the discipline and the game management going for 80 minutes when both sides can score freely, and that’s where a Prem player can find he’s brought a knife to a Test-match gun fight.
Steve Borthwick has spotted the gap himself. He’s criticised the Prem breakdown as less of a contest than the Test one, and after he met the league’s directors of rugby in August, the Prem agreed, according to The Guardian, to bring its refereeing of the offside line, the scrum brake foot and the breakdown into line with international rugby. It’s no slight on Borthwick or his players, more on the weekly diet they’re fed between Test windows.
Is it what we want?
It’s what the league and the broadcasters want, and a neutral on a Saturday afternoon probably does too, but the tries on their own needn’t hurt the product. Super Rugby averaged 8.2 tries a game in 2025 and still had 43.1 per cent of its matches decided by seven points or fewer, whilst PREM Rugby’s own 2024/25 salary cap report records only 32 per cent within seven, and a six-season pattern of rising tries alongside fewer close games. When both sides have a bonus point by half-time, the bonus stops rewarding anything and a try stops being an event. So the harsh truth is that the scoring has exposed a competitive-balance problem the league already had.
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The way the Prem rewards tries may not help either. A side earns a bonus point for four tries whatever it concedes, which is how Bristol lost 94-33 at DPD Franklin’s Gardens in May, conceded 14 tries and still went home with one. The Top 14 and Super Rugby give the bonus only for scoring three tries more than the opposition, whatever the final score, and this season the Investec Champions Cup has followed, explicitly to keep matches competitive to the final whistle. Even Champ Rugby has dropped the four-try bonus this season, so the Prem is now the one English competition still rewarding a try count with no regard to how many a side concedes, and two leagues that scored at almost the same rate last season are now working to different incentives. It’s an incentive rather than a proven cause, and it’s been in place for years, so it can’t explain the recent rise, but it does mean a Prem side chasing four tries has less reason to worry about the ones going in at the other end.
The verdict
There are really two questions here. Why are there more tries? The laws opened the game up, coaches have got far better at converting the space, and the Prem, the Six Nations and Super Rugby have all climbed since 2024, although nobody can yet say how much of the rise belongs to the laws and how much to the coaches. Why does the Prem score more than its neighbours? Partly an unequal league, with Newcastle’s fixtures accounting for nearly two-thirds of last season’s increase, partly the best sides attacking better than ever, and partly a domestic game refereed differently from the Test one until this season.
But there’s a twist that ought to reassure Borthwick. On the same Saturday as the 71-48, under the same laws in the same league, Saracens beat Bristol 30-7 and held them to a single try, and the old virtues still settle results even in the Prem; in the opening round, the side with more kicking metres, fewer rucks and fewer penalties won all five matches. The tries make the highlights, but the best Prem sides are already winning with Test rugby underneath the scoreline, and the question for England is whether their players are learning to manage a shootout as well as to play one.
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