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Tackle height is coming down but RFU have work to do to repair ill-feeling – Andy Goode
By Andy Goode
The tackle height is coming down and the base of the sternum is an improvement but there’s a lot of ill-feeling around the way it’s been handled by the RFU and they’ve still got a lot of work to do.
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After recommendations by World Rugby last month, we now understand the lowering of the tackle height in community rugby across England is part of an opt-in global trial but the original PR disaster from the RFU as they tried to make their move early has left a bitter taste.
If they’d just waited for the news to come from the global governing body first, there wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much of a backlash and why they felt the need to go further and mention “waist height or below” is beyond me.
I speak at amateur rugby clubs up and down the country regularly and you rarely hear a good word about the RFU and the way the game is being run but hopefully they realise the way they went about attempting to implement this without consultation was wrong and the work to try to rebuild the trust of clubs and players can begin now.
Participation numbers have already gone down since the pandemic and I completely understand why a lot of people said they were going to give up the sport because of the lowering of the tackle height so I think a significant amount of money and effort needs investing to ensure there aren’t too many players lost and that new people want to take up the sport.
I hope that the base of the sternum will prove to be a lot more palatable to amateur players than the waist, though, and part of the marketing and PR over the course of the next few months that goes along with this move is going to be that the sport will be even more exciting with more offloads and more tries.
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It’s unfortunate because it’s probably the elite level that has created this issue for the amateur game around the catch tackle and the laws around the maul and players at the professional level, and then further down, have been coached to benefit from them.
I was told categorically that I wasn’t a good chop tackler so to hit high and aim at the ball with the aim of creating a maul and winning a turnover. That became my modus operandi in defence and a lot of other players were coached in a similar way.
Coaches are very dynamic and brilliant at finding a loophole or a way to give their side the edge but if those laws around the catch tackle and maul had been changed 15 years ago, then it might have made a big difference and I still feel you might naturally see a change in tackle height if they were altered now.
The powers that be want to get away from two-man tackles and the narrative will be around getting more enjoyment out of high-scoring games, upskilling players and focusing on the offload and the advantages you can get from that.
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Players will have to make their own judgement on that but I really feel for referees in all this. Refereeing a rugby match is already one of the hardest jobs in sport and this is going to make their role even harder.
Whether it’s judging where the base of the sternum is or dealing with players who are struggling to adapt to the law variations or those who are disgruntled at having to do so, it’s going to be a thankless task and you can’t have a game of rugby without a referee.
Often referees don’t even have assistants at the amateur levels, it’s just a player or coach from each team running touch, and it’s going to be so tough for them to make some of these borderline calls around tackle height that we see officials get wrong at times in the professional game when they have a TMO and a host of camera angles at their disposal.
You just have to hope that the RFU has a plan in places and resources at the ready to support existing referees properly to make the transition to implementing these law variations and that they can still attract new people to give refereeing a go.
The RFU have approved the law variations but World Rugby are describing what they are recommending as an opt-in global trial, so the tackle height could always be raised if it’s found that there are too many head collisions from tacklers going low.
The waist was always far too radical and I think it would’ve potentially killed the game but there’s no doubt a lower tackle height is the way the game is going and the elite level will follow suit to a certain extent at some point too.
We just have to hope it doesn’t change the sport too much but it’s the way the RFU acted a few months ago more than the actual decision itself that created such a deep wound. This should have been the starting point but instead they’re now trying to stitch the wound up a bit.
World Rugby’s guidance last month stated that “national unions are now encouraged to consult with their community rugby game regarding the recommendation,” but the RFU had already dived in head first in January without any consultation.
That is where the problem arose, whether they did so because of the ongoing legal cases or because of other factors, and I think the governing body has a job on to earn back the faith of the players and clubs it represents across England. That hard work has to start now.
I completely agree that the communication has been handled badly; the change was inevitable, though, and as a sport we have to make it successful or risk the game dying through loss of players, lawsuits or legislation.
One thing that surprised me, both in online commentary and in the in-person consultation session I joined, is how hung up coaches and players are on the exact definition of "base of the sternum", "waist", "belly" and the desire for a hard definition of what these mean.
The bottom line - all though it's not been communicated very well to date - is pretty clear:
- We need to reduce the number of head contacts
- The best way to do this is to increase the separation between the ball carrier's head and the tackler's
- To achieve that, we need to get ball carriers to keep their shoulders clearly above their hips, and tacklers to aim at the space between the ribs and the hips, regardless of what we call that.
We need the ball carrier to take some responsibility because otherwise they'll be coached to run with their bodies horizontal in the hope of attracting penalties (and putting themselves at risk).We need the tackler to aim below the ribcage because it forces them to go below the ball carrier's arms, which greatly reduces the risk of someone slipping up to the point where head contact is a risk.
As a referee (at Colts/Girls U16 level) myself, I think in practice it will be fairly easy to referee - and the refs in the consultation were all pretty much agreed on this.
We're going to be looking for clear separation of the heads. Was the ball carrier sufficiently upright? Was the tackler bent at the waist and aiming below the ribs? Did the tackle move into dangerous territory?
We're not typically going to be penalising a tackler who makes contact with the lower end of the ribcage, or who hits at a good height but slips up to chest level. We simply won't be able to make that kind of judgement in the course of a game and with no TMO.
We'll be looking at whether the tackle was safe.
The change gives a much bigger safety margin, so we have more scope to apply common sense. We'll penalise a player whose technique is consistently dangerous, but we won't be getting a tape measure out for every tackle.
In terms of how we coach players to adapt, in practice it is a change of emphasis more than anything else. Imagine holding a tackle pad: where does the contact point (the bit underneath the bulge, for the avoidance of doubt) end up?
The natural place to hold most pads is with the contact point exactly where the new laws want it to be: over the bellybutton. We already train players to hit there - the main adjustment is getting them to hit flatter and not to aim to drive up in the tackle.
Since its earliest days, rugby has been a sport whose administration has stumbled through its biggest changes, sometimes getting them badly wrong (the great schisms with soccer and then league), sometimes muddling through (professionalism) and sometimes doing something positive (the Rugby World Cup and, I hope, the development of the women's game).
So far on tackle heights the game has managed to muddle through. But it is an existential threat to rugby as a sport, and the onus is now on the people who love the game to recognise the necessity of the change, embrace it, and make it something positive.
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