Eddie Jones’s ‘hit and hurt’ comment shows rugby’s mixed up messaging | Ben Ryan

“Whenever you pick a side you are always looking for the biggest, fastest, most skilful guys who like to hit and hurt people.” Eddie Jones said those exact words after the Italy game. Now I very much doubt he wanted to say he picked players that like to inflict injury and I don’t want to pick one soundbite from a press conference and accuse him of being the devil incarnate, but he said it in the public domain, on the record. Quite apart from how that may get interpreted by others in the game, it made me immediately compare his words with the direction of travel in which the game is going at the moment.

Jones uses a throwaway comment like that but would also be the first to say something (as he should) if an England player was injured by some targeted actions to deliberately hurt them. I’m sure he doesn’t condone that sort of behaviour, but his words sum up the game at the moment – a series of conflicting statements and actions; mixed up messaging everywhere.

World Rugby wants to reduce injury rates and make the game easy to understand to attract new supporters, yet the opposite is happening. When certain laws are not enforced it makes the game more violent, attritional and boring. What other sport allows its laws to be broken in the way we can see every weekend in the Six Nations?

We get told about reams of data and evidence when tackle laws are amended but when laws are being overlooked, the shutters go up and no due process is taken as to why.

Say one thing, do another. We go to one extreme like the red card for Danny Cipriani in the Munster v Gloucester game for a dangerous tackle that looks more like the opposition player running into him and then fail to enforce laws like collapsing rucks that have potentially negative repercussions. We see every angle of video to decide if a pass is a few centimetres forward but allow an interpretation of the law that sees players fly off their feet to missile into an opponent at the ruck. The law book should arguably be moved to the fiction section of the bookshelf.

Blair Kinghornwas one of several Scotland players injured against Wales



Blair Kinghornwas one of several Scotland players injured against Wales. Photograph: David Gibson/Fotosport/REX/Shutterstock

Whether it is reacting to concussions or higher tackling, everything happens after the event. The same jet-lagged thinking will happen with the breakdown. It’s a total mess because the law is not getting applied and sense is not prevailing. Laws that are there for a reason yet some things happen on the pitch that beg the question if the body that actually wrote the laws have now decided to tell their officials that some of them don’t really matter?

Think I’m going overboard about the potential consequences? Talk to the players, especially the recently retired ones. Ask them what they are or were having to go through on a weekly basis. Look at the number of players retiring early compared with 10 years ago, the medical costs soaring in the professional game. Look seriously at the levels of participation in XV-a-side around the world and you will see it is not going in the right direction. Second and third teams at rugby clubs are disappearing. The risk to an amateur player to miss work through injury on the field is too great now, so many just don’t play the game as much or at all anymore. Look at the profile of professional players: bigger, heavier and increasingly powerful. It’s going to take a serious incident in a big televised international game to change anything. Again, that change will be a reaction rather than anticipation.


Photograph: Chesnot/Getty Images Europe

I love the game and we all want it to flourish and grow but it has become too attritional and too power-based. The advent of professional rugby brought coaches and clubs more time with teams and one major result was thicker playbooks that produce thicker players – because phase play came in that relied on a pre-programmed set of movements, with less player-led direction and more coach-led orders.

On top of that, the laws as they are being applied actually support blunt force to retain possession, so more time is spent in clubs getting players more powerful. To retain possession you just need to use more application of gross rather than fine skills. There is less need to make decisions around where the spaces are and more need to just carry harder into where the faces are. And that chain of events is started when another law does not seem to be interpreted as I would expect to the letter of what it says.

A tackler under law must have his shoulders no lower than his hips entering the breakdown. What we are seeing are players getting their head and shoulders as low as possible, breaking that law consistently, to get over the ball as a defender and make it as hard as possible for an attacker to dislodge him. That defending player just waits blindly to be smashed at a rate of knots by his opposition player. Repeatedly over 80 minutes. Officials now use phrases such as “he didn’t survive the collision” when they are deciding who is keeping or losing the ball. The clearout has to be illegal, generally the attacker regularly breaks two laws – wilfully coming off their feet and wilfully collapsing the ruck because that’s the only way to shift the tackler. I don’t need to employ a research scientist to tell me that’s going to end badly.

We have to change what’s happening. The breakdown is now literally doing exactly that to the game – bit by bit. We need to apply those laws, start being more proactive in how we can change the game to make it better, make it more accessible to players and to supporters. We have to be forward-thinking and not hide behind statistics that lack the bigger picture. It is a bigger picture that needs to be clearer than it has ever been.

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source: theguardian.com