High Tackles. Them and Us

It seems a long time that the English (and Welsh, and Scottish) experimental tackle laws have been trailed for this season. Loads and loads of scepticism around them and if you follow social media, all of these life long rugby ‘players’, ‘fans’ and experts shouting at social media that they will no longer play or follow the game.

“that’s it – after 40 years, I’m done with rugby!” or the now, very tired “games gone”, or “games gone soft”.

I know a lot of life-long players/supporters and have heard not one of them saying anything like this, apart from the odd grumble or cynical – based on reasonable experience of other experiments – “it’ll never last”. So these Social Media mouths are the equivalent of the bloke down the pub, who’s an expert in the game.

“Used to play, Saracens academy back in the 80’s, England trials, played with, you know that big fella who played for the Lions in the 90’s, not any more, games gone soft, all kicking anyway.” Plenty of them still around – lots of them it seems are now the experts following their kids playing on a Sunday, or private schools in midweek or Saturdays. Its become very clear to me that there is a very clear link between the quality of their kids’ team, and the extent of their experience in the game.

Anyway, I do digress, as yesterday I did an U18 game between two good teams. Actually one very good team, and a good team who were a little unfortunate to end up on a 0-52 scoreline. 8 tries, 6 excellent conversions, mostly from out wide. Enjoyed the game.

Tackling though? Yes, I’m getting to that. This season I have reffed only 2 games (whole different story), but watched 3 lower league games. In all of those games I have seen just a single high tackle of the pre 23/24 vintage, and that was a little unlucky as the small ball carrier was falling at the time. Not my game by the way, just a penalty.

So that’s around 100 players, around half being under 18 and full of testosterone and anger, over 350 minutes of rugby and just one marginally dangerous high tackle. This is only my experience of course but anecdotally I am hearing the same from friends in the game; players, spectators, coaches and refs. Maybe the tackling laws aren't as catastrophic as social media would have us believe.

This is in huge contrast of course to the World Cup, where the question of high tackles has been one of the constant themes.

What should we make of this I wonder? Community rugby is very obviously a very different game to the International version, in many ways. I’ll come back to that.

A very simplistic, but fairly apparent view is that these new laws work. Presumably they work in the way they are intended and that is that we are not concerned with the chest high tackle at all, but with what that can lead to. That is; due to bad timing, unfortunate late movements, tired minds/bodies or even plain old cynicism (ie “how high can I get away with?”), we are trying to rid the game of the head and neck contacts.

I almost said ‘shots’ there, but avoided it as I hate that expression – am I showing my age there?

‘Shots’, ‘hits’ – are these expressions part of the problem? ‘Great tackle’, ‘big tackle’ used to suffice before we adopted these ‘shoot ‘em up’ phrases, but perhaps that’s just language evolving. As an aside I reffed a game last week where the 18 year old full back was calling his team-mates to ‘kill’ when in defence. He may well be related to one of those First World War generals though as he stood at the back, and missed most of his own attempts to, er, kill someone.

So the International game, yes of course its different. One of those differences is of course that they are (for the most part) fully professional. They train, they prepare, they practice far, far more than anyone else.

As for the pros, if they played by these rules, would we still see the same high tackle mayhem? It's a question worth pondering, and if history tells us anything, it's not a matter of "if" but "when" these laws become the norm. So, buckle up, rugby fans, because change is on the horizon, and it might just be for the better – unless you're that guy in the pub who swears the game peaked in the '80s.