As football goes mad and we have to play at spot the Scottish person at your top domestic club, let rugby rescue you this winter. Let the oval- ball game give you a drive and passion you lust for. Leave the inanities of soccer and its easy myths and cloaked half-truths behind and drool at what's coming up.
Football supporters should not read on, as this piece is really far too difficult for you to understand.
Good morning. How are you? Watched the video of the Lions' third Test last night so it's very up mood today, Bill Johnston phoned, did the first bit for telly, drove the M8 through to Edinburgh for the first time in eight weeks, and so it's back into the groove as the rugby season is about to start.
For instance, in one weekend - Sunday, September 14 - Bath are in the Borders, Wasps are at Scotstoun in Glasgow, with Italy's Treviso and French club Biarritz also ''en Ecosse.'' I had my holidays in France, you see.
Now, your honour, is that not enough to make you dribble? Yes, despite the nagging sus-picion in the back of my head that there is too much Southern Hemisphere rugby on the TV and we are getting just a little jaded with those great cheats, the All Blacks and their daft haka, I am convinced that rugby can clear your soul. It can make you a better person.
But, hand on heart, if I see Ian Jones, the All Black second row - a real weed - pretend to be tough guy once more when he is surrounded by his henchmen, or Zinzan Brooke or Sean Fitzpatrick commit one more foul as they wander back obstructing the other team's ball, or Josh Kronfeld fall on the wrong side of the ball, or Frank Bunce go head-hunting once more, then I will complain very, very sternly to their mummies and daddies, who must be ashamed of them. The All Blacks, in winning, but cheating like crazy, give out the wrong message about our game.
But let us get technical as the sun rises this Saturday morning. I have, like a frustrated teenager, spent a great deal of time thinking in my bed of late, and one conclusion is inescapable: forward play has travelled through the panoply of changes but now, after about 10 years of steady mutation, it really is back to where it was at the start of the cycle. The arch-ruck is out, and bodies on the ground will be dealt with severely. The temptation is to say that the men at the top have always said that, but if we do get a sin-bin system in Scotland then the folk at the bottom of rucks preventing the ball from flowing will spend more time playing cards in the dug-outs than anything else.
You see, with so much cheating on the deck, players arriving at breakdowns have been allowed to dive in on the ball to free it up. Which actually, I think, was good for the game in that it meant more predictable possession and, as the Lions showed, if you get your technique right, then the ball comes dribbling back.
However, this year there is to be no diving in, no bending over the player on the ground to form an arch-ruck, and players are supposed to stay on their feet. Which will knacker the cynical, cheating sods that are the All Blacks, but the rest of the world should get on just fine.
So rugby teams the world over will now be refining their rucking techniques to cope with the new way of thinking - or is it actually the old way of thinking? From about two years of trying to figure out a way of bringing the ball back from a tackle situation by going in to pop people off the ball, or free it up by hand, we are now back to terrifying the opposition with clever and aggressive use of studs to make them get out of the way, and then the correct position of bodies and players to make sure it comes back.
I think the key is to design a way of getting the thing back by using the minimum number of bodies. Maybe all we have is the tackled player, a man standing over him, a near-side blocker and another man to generate forward motion. Hell, things are never that easy.
Or, and sorry to name-drop here, but it was Francois Pienaar who said that one man driving up the pitch with the ball in hand won't get far, and maybe we have to evolve a rucking game which starts off with two blokes on the ball. My mind's whirring, the season's about to start, the game is going bananas. William Webb Ellis, you were a great man indeed.
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