Tadhg Beirne cut a figure of frustration on Saturday night with the dust settling on a United Rugby Championship derby in Limerick that won’t live long in the memory.
The Munster versus Leinster match-up traditionally gets hyped as potential classic material, but the reality is that the spectacle more often than not leaves so much to be desired.
So it was again at the weekend, a drab affair with limited creativity to entertain the sold-out 26,006 attendance and those tuning in from around the world on TV. You definitely didn’t need a full hand to count up the game’s best moments.
Leinster fans delighted with the bragging rights will, of course, tell you that winning ugly is still great fun (they have been doing it all season long), but rugby can’t continue messing with the paying public, claiming that it is in the entertainment business but producing matches that frequently pass by without anything memorable happening.
Valid point
The cynics will argue that it is surely up to the respective head coaches to come up with game plans to excite the fans who buy the tickets and pay for the multiple TV subscriptions required to follow the sport. It is a valid point.
Dull, pragmatic coaches, though, don’t want to entertain; they just want the W by whatever means possible. But the way the laws keep changing in a sport where there is too much boardroom meddling has now resulted in a star player such as Beirne making public his frustrations with the direction the game is evolving.
“The style of the game is gone,” reckoned the recent British and Irish Lions Test series winner, trying to make sense of the colourless 13-8 weekend loss. “Let’s be honest, the style of the game has gone backwards if we are being serious.
“Teams are just kicking the ball. Why? Because it’s a 50/50 chance of getting the ball back. Certain teams are going to set-piece more because you put up the 50/50 in the air and you get a knock-on, you get a scrum. And if you have a good scrum, you can get a penalty, into the corner.
“It’s just becoming a set-piece and kicking game with the way they have kind of changed the rules. You see teams kick more and more, and it’s just going to continue going that way unless they decide to do something about it.”
Relying on these behind the scenes bureaucrats who pull the law strings to get it right is a tall order, given the current dog’s dinner of a spectacle from one week to the next.
What about the numbers, though, behind Beirne’s claim that kicking and scrummaging have negatively taken over? Drilling into the statistics of the half-dozen Round Eight URC matches, there were 283 kicks in play across the 480 minutes – basically a kick on average every 101.7 seconds. Just 40 of those kicks were retained.
Switching to the scrum, there were 67 across the weekend, a set-piece every 429.8 seconds. Most interesting was how 24 of those 67 scrums – 35.8 per cent – resulted in an offence getting whistled by a referee.
URC is ahead of the game in terms of the immediate statistical information it volunteers from its matches compared to the rival leagues in England and France.
In PREM Rugby, there were 248 kicks from the hand in its 400 Round Eight minutes last weekend– a kick every 96.7 seconds across the five matches.
There was no information on its website on the number of kicks retained, and it’s similar as regards the number of scrum offences that happened in its 68 put-ins, on average a scrum every 352.9 seconds.