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Written by His Bobness
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Saturday, 17 May 2008 |
Rugby Union's experimental law variations, commonly referred to as
the ELVs, created a rare bout of unanimity on the Silverfern forum this
past week as a clearly mad rogue poster, 'IQ63', referred us to a blog
full of muddled statistics and quotes purporting to show that dark
forces were undermining 'classical' rugby.Regular Fern poster
His Bobness, one of the few here old enough to have lived through the
'classical' period, likened some of the more irrational blanket
opposition to the ELVs to superannuated generals always seeking to
fight the last war..
Rugby, like warfare, evolves. All the best sports do so. Pleas for a
return to some imagined "classical" period when backs played with backs
and forwards played with forwards is rather like asking soldiers to
line up with bows and arrows against tanks.
Just as gin-soaked
old generals lazing in the smoking rooms of their gentlemen's clubs
pine for the days of cavalry charges at The Hun, there is a
reality-challenged faction of reactionaries in rugby who "bah" and
"harrumph" any rule change as an assault on the game's traditions.
The
fact is that the ELVs are an attempt to find a way of breaking down
obstinate league-style defences and liberating the game from bash and
crash.
Like the Earl of Cardigan sending the Light Brigade into
the teeth of the Russian artillery in the Crimea, you stand on your
lonely mountain top crying out for a return to "classicism". A few old
generals in the RFU and shell-shocked veterans like Laurie Mains stand
alongside you, half-heartedly reciting their mantras about southern
hemisphere conspiracies.
But in the final analysis, you simply
cannot ignore the need for experimentation and evolution. The fact is
rugby had become overly dominated by defence and spoiling tactics and
too many games were being decided by penalty kicks awarded for the most
obscure technicalities. Professionalism has bred greater strength,
athleticism and speed across the park. But the game has not kept up,
which means the energy unleashed by those physical advances was being
used in destructive, ball-killing ways.
To use the war analogy again, the theatre of the conflict had not kept pace with the technology.
Now,
you can seek to line up your toy soldiers in your desired "structured"
formations as much as you like. But there are many of us who believe
rugby is an organic game, benefiting from both structure and creative
improvisation.
Indeed, the game is at its best in the tension
between those two forces. What the ELVs seek to do is to reassert some
balance. They may not be perfect. That is why they are called an
"experiment" after all. But is only through experimentation that things
move on.
As Charles Darwin, the evolutionist, once observed: "It
is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most
intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
So it is with rugby.
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