This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with the PREM Rugby extravaganza in Northampton and the new tackle laws…
Are defences the problem?
18 tries and 118 points is a fun afternoon for a rugby fan wherever you are, but sceptics continue to point at the Prem and credibly ask questions about defensive coaches, defensive priorities and even refereeing guidelines. Nine out of ten teams scored four tries this weekend past, something barely conceivable a decade or so ago, as would have been contests and scorelines such as the try-fest at Franklin’s Gardens.
In the build-up to the 2009 Lions tour, Loose Pass was enjoying a couple of what were then Super 14 matches, at the time a somewhat more glamorous and open alternative to the more tense, grinding and often stodgy fare served up by European leagues. One particularly gnarly old British correspondent wandered past the screen we were looking at and asked, with deepest sarcasm: “Anybody made a tackle yet?” His barb was the prevailing sentiment at the time: any game or series that conjured up high numbers of tries might be fun but it was not really good rugby, not physical enough, lots of shirt-grabbing but no shoulders in, et cetera et cetera. “They wouldn’t last half an hour in the fog at Thomond,” and all that.
Perhaps, but then that was also the age when southern hemisphere nations would routinely shred their European counterparts at international level, who frequently found that despite all the conceptions surrounding powder-puff, basketball-scoring Super Rugby, they were beaten up as well as run rings around.
And now we have the Prem, which is racking up the tries more prolifically even than Super Rugby did back in the day. Powder puff basketball or are we truly at the gates of an era of greatness?
An AI-crunched amalgam of several sources suggests the latter. The overall tackle success rate over the past 15 years has decreased very slightly, from around 86 per cent to a shade under 85 per cent – and that latter figure has improved from a post-pandemic dip to around 83 per cent. Hardly earth-shattering. But the significant number is how many tackles per game are now being made. Back in the glorious, grinding days of big packs and lots of mud, teams were making around 100-105 tackles per game. These days, that number is often up beyond 140. So where once, 14 tackles per team per game were being missed, that number has now jumped to around 23.
PREM Rugby: Why the tries keep coming, and is Test rugby following?
It doesn’t explain the explosion in tries, as we are still at around 12 missed tackles per try. At most, we are looking at one extra try per team directly attributable to tackles missed.
None of which paints a picture of powder-puff, defence-light rugby either. Instead, there are three important aspects currently influencing the game far more. A research paper from the International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport from 2024 suggests that the evolving laws have led to five-odd more minutes of ball-in-play time, with the modern game now hovering close to 40 minutes, up from 34 back in 2011. As you would expect, try-scoring increases per ball-in-play minute, but this increase is not linear, it accelerates. Those extra minutes can be worth up to three tries per match in some instances.
The same study found that although the number of rucks per team per game had increased from 70-ish to 90-ish, the number of rucks needed per try had decreased too, to 28. Meanwhile, tries with a maul origin have doubled in number, while also doubling as a proportion of overall tries scored as well.
But, and this is the point of all this: by and large, more stringent policing of the defence at rucks and mauls has produced more ball-in-play time, more phases, more opportunities to go for the line and a reduced reliance on kicks for goal. Defences are performing at about the same level as they used to. Powder-puff basketball it is not, but a slip of standards – Bath’s tackle completion was at around 76 per cent on Saturday – leads to far harsher punishment on the scoreboard.
New tackle laws cause mixed feelings
As one who once enjoyed a forced four months off playing after a hip-drop tackle, Loose Pass welcomed the new tackle regulations this week, even if it was an odd choice to give everybody three weeks’ grace; Christophe Ridley and his TMO did not get the entire memo it seems. Strange though, that the European competitions will start off with one set of rules and end with another.
Anyway, less enamoured with it all were the New Zealand studio duo of Justin Marshall and Jeff Wilson, who thought that – and as has happened with numerous head shots over the past couple of years – tacklers even with honest intentions were in danger of becoming vilified. They used the example of Rob Valetini’s tackle on Leroy Carter as an example; an odd choice, being as Carter is now nursing exactly the kind of injury this tackle can cause.
“Carter’s ahead of him, he’s trying to pull him backwards,” said Marshall.
“Look at Valetini, he’s leaning back towards the All Blacks tryline, thinking ‘I’ve got to try and stop him from grounding the ball’.
“He hasn’t intentionally put weight and force through the lower body of Leroy Carter to injure him, it is purely accidental, so we’ve got to be careful here.”
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A reasonable argument, but which puts us back in that grey area of how to interpret recklessness, intention and others in instances of dangerous play, and weigh those up against the outcome. The laws are there to make the game safer, not to judge intentions.
The bottom line is that it will not be perfect for a while; perhaps never will be, but the safer we can make the game, the better. Like the regulations on croc rolls, it doesn’t always end in serious injury, but the danger is clear and obvious.
We’ll see how it goes. But should anybody need a reminder of how to tackle like Valetini but on the legal side of the new laws… well, there’s only one video to look at: