Welcome, as soon as once more, to the Weekend Version. I gained’t let you know what occurred in video games on Friday night time, and I’m not going to let you know what I feel goes to occur in video games that’re on Saturday afternoon, or on Sunday. However, I’m not going to cease you speaking about these video games within the feedback; actually, I’d find it irresistible.
So, what’s going to I write about? I’m within the information that falls by way of the cracks every week. I’m hoping to select up the odd bit of reports that is available in after Hoss’s marathon news-gathering efforts on Fridays. If that fails, I’ll should make some shit up.
This week I’m going to have a look at
Is There One thing Improper With The Scrum
With the glut of entrance row accidents popping out of the Waratahs camp this season, I assumed it is likely to be a very good time to speak in regards to the scrum and the way it’s modified through the years.
Keith will bear in mind the times when there was no distinction between a scrum and a ruck and there have been no fastened positions, however the remainder of us are approach too younger for that. The South Africans developed the 3-4-1 configuration we use immediately, and it slowly took over in every single place.
Initially, the offside line was the ball, however the warmth of the opposition halfback and his flankers arriving simply after the ball acquired to be an excessive amount of for all concerned. So, the offside line was moved to the rearmost foot of the scrum someday within the late Nineteen Sixties.
Within the Nineties New Zealand began “profitable the hit” and pushing ahead because the hooker hooked the ball. This made it practically not possible for opposition hookers to contest the ball within the scrum, so that they merely gave up and pushed as an alternative. It had the added bonus of forcing the defending backline to retreat to remain onside. This modified the scrum right into a pushing contest the place energy was the extra vital than talent.
Pretty shortly, entrance rowers began getting injured as groups crashed into one another from as distant as a metre. It was determined that as an alternative of permitting the 2 packs to manage the engagement, the referee would name when to have interaction. What adopted was a decade or extra of various calls and methods of various effectiveness.
Right this moment’s calls are “Crouch, Bind, Set” with the bind name meant to de-power the hit and cut back accidents to entrance rowers.
I’d counsel many of the issues we have now with immediately’s scrum may be traced again to 1996 and New Zealand’s sensible ways to win entrance foot ball. If the rugby world hadn’t been coping with the cosmic shift to professionalism, they might have addressed the basis of the problem as an alternative of sticking band-aid after band-aid on this bleeding wound.
For me, the basis of the problem is the scrum ought to be a hooking contest and never a pushing contest. The pushing contest is the basis of lots of the accidents we see immediately, as gamers push their our bodies. Gamers are getting greater and stronger at youthful ages, however ligament and tendon progress doesn’t at all times sustain with muscle progress.
I don’t suppose it’s important to be a genius to note that almost all of gamers injured are youthful. Was it a coincidence that the final two out of the eleven entrance rowers injured on the Waratahs have been additionally their two oldest? Or that these gamers had taken on additional workload to cowl for the dearth of expertise of the gamers known as into the squad.
Earlier than 1996, hookers in rugby have been smaller and extra versatile. With the change within the scrum, the hooker grew to become a digital third prop, with many bodily unable to hook for the ball and reliant on the scrum transferring ahead for his or her staff to win the ball. What number of instances have you ever seen a ball sitting in the course of a scrum and nobody in a position to get their foot as much as hook it?
Tips on how to repair it? I feel with out actually understanding it we made a alternative in 1996 and for higher or worse we selected energy over finesse, and now we simply should make the most effective of the selections made all these years in the past.
Queensland Announce Tongan Tour
How good is that this! The Queensland Reds males’s and girls’s sides are enjoying in Tonga on 26 July. Right here is the press launch.
The Queensland Reds ladies’s and males’s groups will journey to Tonga on 26 July to play historic worldwide matches in opposition to Tonga’s Ikale Tahi nationwide sides on the Teufaiva Sports activities Stadium.
The matches are a part of the continuing assist of Tongan rugby by the Australian Authorities, Rugby Australia, and the Queensland Reds by way of the Australia-Pacific Rugby Union Partnership (APRUP). The partnership helps convey our nations nearer collectively by way of a shared love of rugby union.
The boys’s match would be the second worldwide sport in every week for the Reds, following the sport in opposition to Wales at Suncorp Stadium on 19 July. It’s going to even be the primary time the Reds ladies have performed offshore in a historical past now spanning 28 years.
The Tonga tour provides to a blockbuster collection of post-Tremendous Rugby video games in opposition to worldwide and elite membership opposition, together with Japan’s Saitama Panasonic Wild Knights in November and the Northern Hemisphere tour in January 2025 in opposition to European sides, together with English membership Bristol.
The tour will even present very important match expertise for the Tongan sides forward of the Pacific Nations Cup and Tonga’s qualification for World Rugby’s new WXV ladies’s rugby event.
The tour has the assist of the Australian Authorities’s PacificAus Sports activities program and can embody group and high-performance actions in Tonga forward of the matches. These actions embody teaching clinics, ladies in rugby management periods, and group college visits to boost inclusive rugby pathways in Tonga and additional strengthen Australia and Tonga’s shut ties.
This would be the first time Queensland Reds males have performed Tonga since 1995 and would be the first-ever match-up for the ladies.
https://reds.rugby/information/historic-tonga-tour-announced-for-queensland-reds-2024517
That’s it from me. Have an amazing weekend and I’ll see you within the feedback.
