Northern Edition

Select Edition

Northern Northern
Southern Southern
Global Global
New Zealand New Zealand
France France

Ref watch: Is it time the charge-down was scrapped?

By PA
Players remonstrate with the referee Christophe Ridley /PA

The words ‘movement’ and ‘approach’ have surely never been scrutinised with such forensic detail as following the controversial ending of this weekend’s Gallagher Premiership clash between Exeter and Northampton.

ADVERTISEMENT

With the clock in the red at the end of the toughest of arm-wrestles, Chiefs’ replacement fly-half Joe Simmonds MBE faced a tough match-determining conversion. Across the wind, from a wide-angle and on the harder side for a right-footed kicker, a successful kick won the match for Exeter while a miss left Saints triumphant.

Northampton’s Ollie Sleightholme was alert to the possibilities and immediately the home no.10 launched his pre-kick routine with a twitch of the shoulders, the visitors’ winger raced to the ball and when he arrived ahead of a hesitant Simmonds proceeded to kick it into touch.

Video Spacer

Who were the best players in round 2 of the Six Nations? | RugbyPass Offload

Video Spacer

Who were the best players in round 2 of the Six Nations? | RugbyPass Offload

Referee Christophe Ridley, who viewed the entire incident from a perfect position, confirmed the kick had failed and blew the final whistle before clarifying his decision to the home players with the words; “He started his sequence.”

According to Law Eight:

‘All opposing players retire to their goal line and do not overstep that line until the kicker begins the approach to kick. When the kicker does this, they may charge or jump to prevent a goal but must not be physically supported by other players in these actions.’

To most laymen making an approach involves reducing the distance between your starting point and your planned destination – which a shoulder twitch fails to achieve. On this basis Ridley’s interpretation would be incorrect.

However, last July’s Super Rugby Aotearoa round five clash between the Crusaders and the Blues raised a similar charge-down query based on the kicker commencing his approach with a backward movement in the long-forgotten style of former British Lions’ skipper Gavin Hastings. This caused NZ Rugby to formally query “What is meant by the phrase approach to kick?”

ADVERTISEMENT

In response, the sport’s governing body issued a law clarification:

‘The moment the kicker moves in any direction it is deemed that he is ‘approaching to kick.’ The reason for this interpretation is simplicity, otherwise the referee would have to judge when the kicker first moves, and in what direction. It would also be open to misinterpretation by players, match officials and spectators.’

Of course, this still fails to deal with the multitude of kickers – most notably including Jonny Wilkinson – whose pre-kick routine involves plenty of movement of the upper body but no movement of the whole body away from or towards the ball.

As a consequence, for a second time in as many weeks (following the Jonny May swallow dive controversy during England’s Six Nations win over Italy) World Rugby have been presented with a question that hinges on minute detail.

In part this is their own doing, since the last decade has seen multiple attempts to make our sport more accessible by reducing the complexity and size of the law book. As a result, just as the direct instruction ‘a player must not jump into a tackle’ disappeared so did the use of the phrase ‘offers to kick’ in relation to the kicker’s movement towards the ball.

ADVERTISEMENT

This less ‘belt-and-braces’ approach to the law book’s wording requires the team taking charge to interpret the lawmakers’ intentions, which it seems to me is not a step forward.

Admittedly, in rugby’s upper echelons this is balanced by the extended use of slo-mo replays and the TMO – but there is an interesting parallel here with football, where the use of VAR for offside rather than sorting out ‘the howler’ has made millimetres significant in decision making, which was never the intention.

Law prohibits defending players from doing anything unsportsmanlike to distract the kicker. A number of social media users have cited clearly audible shouting as a reason for the referee to order a re-take of the conversion – but having watched the incident a number of times it seems that this comes from the Northampton bench not the charging players.

Given the Ridley’s positioning is perfect, he clearly had confidence in his decision. However, given the tightness of the call and the minute detail on which this all hinged, surely a referral to the TMO was appropriate? That said, having watched available footage a number of times I still have doubt since there is not an angle concurrently showing Sleightholme and Simmonds, so this may not have helped.

In summary, we can anticipate further World Rugby clarifications on what constitutes ‘an approach to kick’ in the near future – but instead how about a more radical change which removes the charge-down altogether?

Not only would this remove a complication, but in the process speed up the restart since there would no longer be any requirement for defenders to return to the goal-line.

ADVERTISEMENT

LIVE

{{item.title}}

Trending on RugbyPass

Comments

0 Comments
Be the first to comment...

Join free and tell us what you really think!

Sign up for free
ADVERTISEMENT

Latest Features

Comments on RugbyPass

J
JW 24 minutes ago
‘The problem with this year’s Champions Cup? Too many English clubs’

Like I've said before about your idea (actually it might have been something to do with mine, I can't remember), I like that teams will a small sustainable league focus can gain the reward of more consistent CC involvement. I'd really like the most consistent option available.


Thing is, I think rugby can do better than footballs version. I think for instance I wanted everyone in it to think they can win it, where you're talking about the worst teams not giving up because they are so far off the pace we get really bad scoreline when that and giving up to concentrate on the league is happening together.


So I really like that you could have a way to remedy that, but personally I would want my model to not need that crutch. Some of this is the same problem that football has. I really like the landscape in both the URC and Prem, but Ireland with Leinster specifically, and France, are a problem IMO. In football this has turned CL pool stages in to simply cash cow fixtures for the also ran countries teams who just want to have a Real Madrid or ManC to lose to in their pool for that bumper revenue hit. It's always been a comp that had suffered for real interest until the knockouts as well (they might have changed it in recent years?).


You've got some great principles but I'm not sure it's going to deliver on that hard hitting impact right from the start without the best teams playing in it. I think you might need to think about the most minimal requirement/way/performance, a team needs to execute to stay in the Champions Cup as I was having some thougt about that earlier and had some theory I can't remember. First they could get entry by being a losing quarter finalist in the challenge, then putting all their eggs in the Champions pool play bucket in order to never finish last in their pool, all the while showing the same indifference to their league some show to EPCR rugby now, just to remain in champions. You extrapolate that out and is there ever likely to be more change to the champions cup that the bottom four sides rotate out each year for the 4 challenge teams? Are the leagues ever likely to have the sort of 'flux' required to see some variation? Even a good one like Englands.


I'd love to have a table at hand were you can see all the outcomes, and know how likely any of your top 12 teams are going break into Champions rubyg on th back it it are?

120 Go to comments
f
fl 3 hours ago
‘The problem with this year’s Champions Cup? Too many English clubs’

"Right, so even if they were the 4 worst teams in Champions Cup, you'd still have them back by default?"

I think (i) this would literally never happen, (ii) it technically couldn't quite happen, given at least 1 team would qualify via the challenge cup, so if the actual worst team in the CC qualified it would have to be because they did really well after being knocked down to the challenge cup.

But the 13th-15th teams could qualify and to be fair I didn't think about this as a possibility. I don't think a team should be able to qualify via the Champions Cup if they finish last in their group.


Overall though I like my idea best because my thinking is, each league should get a few qualification spots, and then the rest of the spots should go to the next best teams who have proven an ability to be competitive in the champions cup. The elite French clubs generally make up the bulk of the semi-final spots, but that doesn't (necessarily) mean that the 5th-8th best French clubs would be competitive in a slimmed down champions cup. The CC is always going to be really great competition from the semis onwards, but the issue is that there are some pretty poor showings in the earlier rounds. Reducing the number of teams would help a little bit, but we could improve things further by (i) ensuring that the on-paper "worst" teams in the competition have a track record of performing well in the CC, and (ii) by incentivising teams to prioritise the competition. Teams that have a chance to win the whole thing will always be incentivised to do that, but my system would incentivise teams with no chance of making the final to at least try to win a few group stage matches.


"I'm afraid to say"

Its christmas time; there's no need to be afraid!

120 Go to comments
LONG READ
LONG READ Barrett and Prendergast put Leinster European rivals on notice Barrett and Prendergast put Leinster European rivals on notice
Search