Much has changed since the Springboks hit the summit of the game in Yokohama three years ago.
The world seems a different place and the game too has undergone changes that have sharply divided opinion.
The weighty question of whether rugby is as watchable as it was three years ago is one international coaches don’t have to grapple with on a daily basis, yet it is the teams under their remit that help shape perception.
The game at the highest level is being served up in a climate in which safety comes first, whether prioritised by coaches or its interventionist match officials.
Devoid of spectacle
The game is often devoid of spectacle, but consensus on how that is defined is hard to reach.
Some will argue rugby’s current charm isn’t so much contained in free-flowing attack at Test level, but rather the manner in which the gap has closed between the game’s traditional powers and the chasing pack.
Anybody can literally beat anybody on any given day. For a wider audience that is quite exciting
— Springbok coach Jacques Nienaber
Springbok coach Jacques Nienaber finds pleasure in the quality of the arm wrestle, and is less concerned about why the elbows are on the table in the first place. “I like the product in terms of how tight it is,” said the Bok coach.
“Georgia beat Italy in June. Then they beat Wales in November. Italy beat Wales in Cardiff, Argentina beat England and New Zealand away from home. I don’t want to refer to tier-one and tier-two nations, but I think the gap between the top eight teams and the rest is a lot tighter.
“Anybody can literally beat anybody on any given day. For a wider audience that is quite exciting,” said Nienaber, citing how much more difficult it now is to beat Italy than, say, a decade ago.
Filling their boots in Italy
The Boks, of course, handed Italy a thrashing last month but the Azzurri’s general upward curve has helped solidify the point Nienaber is trying to make.
Italy’s Kiwi coach Kieran Crowley has a win ratio of 43%, which stacks up pretty well against coaches of teams ranked higher in the world order. Recently fired Wales coach Wayne Pivac and Dave Rennie of the Wallabies have a 38% win ratio, while Los Pumas’ Michael Cheika comes in with 42%.
The point is perhaps further illustrated by the previously capricious France going unbeaten this year, while Ireland lost just two Tests.
Indeed, the series involving New Zealand and Ireland, SA and Wales, as well as Australia and England all went to a decider in June.
But if Test matches are decided by tighter margins, how has that impacted the way teams go about their business?
The popular metric used in determining whether a match should be elevated to the realm of spectacle, or whether spectators are getting value for money, is the amount of time the ball stays in play.
Ball in play versus ball in hand
Across the three series mentioned above, the ball was in play for an average 34 minutes per Test.
What happened for the rest of the match? Did players dawdle to the lineout, were scrums routinely reset, did players feign injury to slow play down, or did match officials lingeringly eye the big screen hoping to finger someone?
Nienaber, though, was keen to draw the distinction between “ball in play” and “ball in hand”.
Just because the game isn’t littered with restarts like lineouts and scrums doesn’t pass it for spectacle. “It differs from team to team, the ones you play against,” the Bok coach cautioned.
“You get teams that don’t play ball in hand and kick a lot. You get higher ball in play time. Let’s say there are 80 kicks in the game and the average kick takes six, seven seconds, if you add all that up it’s a lot of time,” said Nienaber.
The example he gave adds up to about nine and a half minutes per game.
Game of greys and opaques
Rugby though is a game of greys and opaques.
“Sometimes when both teams run at each other a lot, ball in play can be 31, 32 minutes,” said Nienaber.
“If you get teams that kick a lot and it becomes like a tennis game and that number can blow up to 38, 39 minutes. I think, though, the speed of the game is quicker, ball in hand.”
His team perhaps led the way in the second half of the year as they showed greater commitment to hanging on to the ball.
The area, however, in which the game will have to improve its PR is the laws and their application. Coaches and fans are finding them tough to make sense of and it is unlikely to win over new fans.
Coaches who have not lamented decisions made by match officials this year are as rare as dummy scissors.
Wallabies coach Rennie had cause to draw attention to the problem after his team’s defeat in the second Bledisloe Test in Auckland. “I just reckon it’s such a tough game to referee at the moment,” said Rennie.
“The game takes forever to play because you have a TMO [television match official] chipping in as well. It’s messy, isn’t it? It’s not a great product,” he sighed.
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