ROB Baxter believes World Rugby’s latest proposals to make further law changes will end up alienating supporters, rather than attracting them.
The game’s governing body announced last month a detailed plan aimed at speeding up the game with a tranche of law amendments, all of which they claim will help make the game a more viable spectacle for the watching public.
Those potential changes, which will be voted on by World Rugby’s council next month, include 20-minute red cards, the abolition of a scrum option from a free-kick, as well as ‘Dupont’s’ offside law. They will also see a specialist working group set up to examine the results of the community tackle-height trials across 11 unions and their ‘appropriateness for elite rugby’.
The plan has caused much debate among the rugby world in recent weeks and Baxter, the Exeter Chiefs director of rugby, was not shy in coming forward when asked to give his take on the proposals.
“We’re trying to grow the game, yet there’s no sport in the world that tries to grow by confusing new supporters every 12 months,” he said. “We need to stop changing the laws. The game was fine three or four years ago – and we didn’t need to change it then.
“If you look at it, 90 per cent of what we do in the law changes is to redo things that have been created by other law changes. It’s madness.
“We can’t talk about growing the game….you grow the game by introducing new players and people to it, but we’re confusing new people coming to the game every year by changing laws and interpretations.
We’re preventing ourselves from allowing a good product to happen.
“If they decide to make law changes, they have to put a moratorium on not changing them any more. Let’s settle down and get on with it.”
It’s not the first time the 53-year-old has raised his concer ns over the continual adaptation of laws – and he believes that is an obsession within certain sections of the game to devalue areas such as the scrum and maul.
“We seem infatuated with thinking that depowering the scrum and maul will create this game that everyone wants to come and watch,” added Baxter. “The more you depower the scrum and maul, the more you’re going to create a game that people are not going to watch, because there’ll be no space. If there’s no freekick option at scrum, as soon as the scrum hits the floor or whatever, the back-
