No to ‘zombie rugby’ — Rassie Erasmus and his coaches send powerful message to World Rugby

If you’re a keen Springbok watcher, and therefore familiar with coach Rassie Erasmus’s history with governing body World Rugby, you’ll know their relationship has been strained at times.

Erasmus’s maverick approach to the staid lines of communication with World Rugby led to one of the most infamous public rants about refereeing in the sport’s history. It also led to a 10-month ban for the Bok mentor.

Erasmus is, of course, highly competitive. He would be failing in his job if he weren’t looking for an edge for his team. This has led to a bumping of heads with authorities at times – but if rugby’s rule makers are serious about the future of the game, about growing its appeal and audience, they could do worse than to listen to the Bok coach.

He is a great innovator, which he has married with a unique style of engagement, using social media from his commanding platform to show his and therefore the Boks’ thinking to the entire world.

In the past few weeks on his Rassie+ YouTube channel, Erasmus has released a three-part “series” in which he and most of the Bok management talk about the game and question aspects of it. It’s packaged as entertainment, which it is, as Erasmus and his crew have good chemistry and are clearly comfortable talking openly to each other.

But underneath the label of “content”, it’s really about sending messages to World Rugby and its Shape of the Game conference later this month.

There is a sector of the rugby world that wants to continue to lessen the power of the scrum, limit or eradicate contestable kicks altogether, and increase ball-in-play (BIP) time, among other changes. Erasmus and his cohorts argue that continuing down this path would homogenise the sport to the point where it fails the World Rugby Charter, the governing body’s own guiding document.

Rugby’s ‘constitution’

Erasmus has cleverly used the charter as a defence of the traditional aspects of rugby. One of his guests, former Test referee Jaco Peyper, who is on the Bok coaching staff, calls it rugby’s “constitution”. And the purpose of this document is to protect the sport’s unique identity.

Perhaps the charter’s most important principle is that rugby should be a game for all shapes and sizes. As it states: “The wide variation of skills and physical requirements needed for the game means that there is an opportunity for individuals of every shape, size and ability to compete.”

It’s a sport that must accommodate athletes with a wide range of physical attributes, from the 2m-tall locks to the 130kg props and the 75kg wings, and many other types in between. These different bodies are needed because rugby is made up of different components: scrums, line-outs, contestable kicks, structured ball-in-hand attack, breakdowns, mauls and several other aspects. Athletes of different body shape and skills are needed to fulfil the charter.

The example of Bok wing Cheslin Kolbe and tighthead prop Frans Malherbe is used. Both are vital to the Boks’ success and needs, yet they could hardly be more different as athletes. This, Erasmus and his panel argue, is what makes the game beautiful and unique.

Erasmus highlights that letting the game become purely about speed and stamina creates “sporting eugenics” – essentially breeding a prop out of the sport. Kolbe is about 75kg with electric feet and speed. He’s built for space and aerial skills. Malherbe is 125kg and built for static power, for scrumming, for holding up the entire weight of a pack.

Malherbe can’t survive in that kind of aerobic marathon. So, the “boring” parts of the game – the time it takes to set a scrum, the slow walk to a line-out – are actually features, not bugs.

These stoppages are the life support system for the power athletes. They allow the anaerobic giants such as Malherbe to recover so they can do the one thing in which they are absolutely elite: pushing other massive athletes backwards.

If you lose the stoppages, you lose the Frans Malherbes. And if you lose them, you violate the charter, Erasmus argues.

The “spirit of the game”, according to the charter, is defined by contest and continuity. This contest must exist at every phase: scrums, line-outs, kickoffs and restarts. The panel argue that “flow” should be an outcome of a fair contest, not a goal in itself.

Ball-in-play

One of the most provocative points made during the discussion is the critique of BIP metrics. In recent years, stakeholders have pressured referees to increase BIP time to create a more “entertaining” product. In other words, more “flow”.

However, the panel cheekily compares these statistics to a “bikini”, noting that they “reveal quite a bit but hide the best part”. A high BIP stat does not necessarily equate to a high-quality game, Erasmus argues; instead, it often results in “zombie rugby”.

A clip from a Leicester game in the English Premiership is shown. The ball is in play for ages. A forward takes the ball, runs into a defensive wall, falls down and recycles. And so it goes on because the defence is perfectly set every time.

Erasmus and his crew contend that there is no real tension in that situation. It’s just activity and the clock is ticking. The stats guy is high-fiving everyone, but the fans are actually falling asleep.

They point to matches such as the 1995 World Cup final, where the ball was in play for less than 30 minutes of a 100-minute contest, yet the intensity remained world class. Conversely, a game with 30 phases of “one-off” rugby might have high BIP, but it often lacks the dynamic, broken-field action that fans actually crave.

The panel warns that judging referees based on BIP performance indicators can lead to “manipulation”, where officials stop refereeing the breakdown or the scrum simply to keep the clock ticking.

Instead of manipulating the ball while it is in play, the panel suggests a focus on “ball-out-of-play” management. Enforcing existing laws, such as the 30-second limit for line-outs and the 60-second limit for kicks at goal, can increase the tempo of the game without sacrificing its integrity.

The discussion is deep and layered and could fill a book. But, in short, Erasmus has used his social media platform to send a message to World Rugby that he might not have been able to send through “normal” channels: honour your own charter. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.