The Silver Fern

@Duluth said in Rugby Law Updates:

@Bones said in Rugby Law Updates:

If the "halfback" at the breakdown rolls the ball more than two feet, rolls it twice, touches it with both hands for more than two seconds....ball is out.

Easier just to have a quicker "use it" time that is strictly enforced. When that law was first trialled in the NPC it worked well (5 years ago?)

It ends slow motion rucks of any sort. Also it rewards organised teams with good cardio.. it punishes the opposite with errors/turnovers

Just penalize the little fucker for being offside like it says in the Lawbook.

Or at the very least let me clear him the fuck out instead of making him Royal game. See also scrums.

I’d hoped that by this stage Rassie, Brownie & Co. Would have established Bok dominance in at least one more 1st phase. Will need to pull fingers out to gain comprehensive dominance at lineouts, kickoffs & dropouts before ‘27.

@pakman I saw this - no surprise that Jackman talks sense about their scrum. He’s an outlier who’s been saying most of the things he said in the video since at least before the last World Cup.

Expect he’ll remain a Cassandra until/unless refs police the Irish scrum even in games where the other pack doesn’t have the sort of dominance that makes their chicanery impossible to ignore.

@pakman said in Bokke vs Ireland:

I don't believe JvdF makes a huge difference, as Kolisi isn't huge, but the first half did make me wonder how good Sheehan is at scrum time.

I think people overstate how much a good scrum is just down to props. Hooker is also very key, and Argentinians used to consider more important than LH. TH lock absolutely crucial, and LH becomes very key if down to seven men.

On the importance of the hooker front, it was noticeable in Boks 2 that ABs started to push Boks back when McAlister replaced Taukei'aho. Mind you, at that stage we had three locks in scrum and RG had played 50 minutes, which is long for him!

I agree that the unwashed punditry generally overemphasize individual props when discussing scrum performance. All 8 have a role to play, especially if like Ireland your props are weak as Yank piss.

My point re JvdF & the Irish hookers is that they’re luxuries that can only be accommodated because the Irish front row has not been properly policed. If they start to be then relatively mobile Irish props would start practicing their throwing and JvdF should, at least for matches involving SA, NZ & France, expect to find himself riding the pine to allow a bigger body to man the pumps early doors.

@pakman you missed the boks dismantling the Irish scrum like a sociopathic schoolboy pulling the wings and legs off bugs.

Thought it would be right up your alley.

You’re bang on about the crazy bench gamble the Irish took. Which made me think this has been coming for so long.

Somehow Porter (and to a lesser extent Furlong) have been allowed to scrum illegally and play bullshit Bill Young games for almost a decade.

Which in turn allowed them to spend more time conditioning themselves to get about the field so they could hit more rucks, make more tackles and most egregiously: do that twinkle toes bullshit that brought them both so much empty praise from the cheerleading chorus pretending to be the Irish rugby press.

It also made it possible for Ireland to field JvdF and not one but two undersized but agile hookers.

This brazen but hugely successful long con - that both Porter & Furlong were Herculean scrummagers - made the Irish intricate multiphase game possible (to say nothing of how it improved their defence.)

Similarly, their game has depended on a cynical approach to the breakdown that amounts to daring the ref to make decisions he doesn’t want to make. Once (if) you find his limit, ride it all game long. I admire this so much I’ve adopted it for the jnr teams I coach.

Until Saturday, no ref had called the Irish bluff at both the scrum and the breakdown in a single game. In the QF Porter was for the first time in the tournament fairly reffed, and their breakdown bullshit became a moot point because Cane led the ABs to dominate the breakdown.

And yet, it’s taken another two years for a ref to apply the laws to Ireland.

The big question is whether this game will have a lasting impact on how Porter & co are reffed so that Leinster & Ireland will from now on have to select bigger hookers, proper locks and go 6-2 on the bench in order to stay competitive or whether refs will simply resume business as usual.

As with the Lood case where refs have continued to ignore leading with the shoulder where impact is not high, I am not holding my breath.

@antipodean the insults we lob are often less about our target than a revelation of our own fearful/disgusted insecurities

@taniwharugby we win one game in Dublin and completely lose the run of ourselves. I need another two decades of the boks treating Irish frontrowers like single ply bogroll before I’m ready to consider this sort of nonsense.

@booboo I just wrote it down. It belongs to the Fern and every forward who’s finally caught one of the fuckers.

I’m very over TMO’s interfering.

@Bones so potent I’m a contradiction in terms

@Bones I knew there was a reason we weren’t converting our pressure into points. Go support the Bulls or Leinster you keyboard curse. Away with your bad juju from Rugby’s equivalent of Mother Theresa, Florence Nightingale and that guy who chose not to patent the polio vaccine

@pakman maybe so, but Steenekamp is very scary to Irish props. Venter’s just there to take the shine off the new ball.

That’s a strong looking Irish team that’s shown impressive week on week improvement. Might just be able to hold the boks to a two score victory.*

*Unless the scrum and/or breakdown are reffed properly or the TMO’s comms system breaks down.

@Dodge said in Red Cards & HIA:

the TMO thing I see as a slightly separate subject. As I said on Saturday, in general i'm in favour of better decisions made badly over bad decisions made live but the balance does feel off. I don't like seeing a TMO bringing stuff back for a knock on in the middle of the park, I do agree it should be used for foul play but at the moment some of that stuff is too minor to be being interfered with

Agree that the TMO thing should be considered separately but in reality it’s all part of the same problem:

Coaches, fans and, I think to a lesser extent players, not accepting what I thought was a central tenet of the game - the ref is the sole judge of fact and law (or as I ounce heard a tough old English coach tell a bleating parent: there’s one ref Mate, and you’re not it!)

As a sport we need to celebrate every ref who picks up a whistle to try and do the impossible: fairly ref our game.

That starts with coaches accepting that they will get some big calls wrong and refusing to be baited by click hungry journalists into critical comments. It also demands that this begging for penalties & cards and simulation, in fact anything that makes it harder to ref the game get penalized/carded.

Hold your head and soccer simulate until you get the penalty then get up a play on? Fuck you - straight red.

See also pushing balls out of rucks, celebrating when you knocked on instead of grounding the try, pulling back at the scrum, placing the ball under the tackler at the ruck.

@MN5 puts his licking his chops during the Haka in a whole new light, don’t it?

@MN5 how can you hate a golden retriever? He’s just doing the tricks he was taught so someone will pat him on the head and say who’s the goodest boy?! Polly is! Yes he is, yes he is!

And then give him another ball to chase or ruck rat to harass. Even his mouthing off is just like a retriever barking at you saying play with me.

This English team is disgustingly hard to hate. Hope the Argies thrash them.

Doubt that will happen but I do expect the Argies to win.

Think you’ll find that the points scored against you in the second half is a better indicator of whether or not you “won” the first half.

Italy were excellent for 35 minutes, good for another twenty odd and then just ran out of tests quality players. Hats off to their staff and players. They are going to cause lots of teams trouble if they keep developing like they have since we played in the summer.

Mostert and Van Staaden with two of the dumbest acts we’ve seen since Doc R took over. Abject. The team fines session should be hilariously merciless.

Every other bok was very good to outstanding. Especially because the scrum reffing was almost worse than Mostert and van Staaden. Thankfully the Rugby Gods didn’t stand for it so Garbisi’s numbers took a bit of a hit.

@mohikamo yeah, it’s what you guys did to us for years.