Do we have your attention now?
That should be the general feeling around any sport when its biggest names are publicly singing the same tune on one issue.
In rugby’s case, it started back in December when Irish legend Brian O’Driscoll grabbed headlines with his thoughts on the declining skill level in XVs.
“There is a huge focus on scores in the weights room, as opposed to [throwing] a 10-metre pass on the run,” O’Driscoll told The Telegraph’s Daniel Schofield.“They should be rugby players becoming athletes, not athletes becoming rugby players.”
Then this week, All Blacks head coach Steve Hansen also spoke out on the state of the game.
“I’ve actually got big concerns about [rugby] at the moment,” Hansen said in an interview with Simon Thomas of WalesOnline. “There are not enough tries being scored which is turning the fans away.”
Rugby May be Getting Too Boring for Canadians
If you’re keeping score at home, that’s the head coach of the defending Rugby World Cup champions, and arguably the best center to ever play the game both asking the same question:
“Is rugby becoming boring?”
By any logic, that should be cause for some serious thought all across the rugby world.
In this corner of the globe, the bigger concern is that rugby may be getting too boring for Canadians in particular. The need for a more free-flowing, high-scoring game would have long seemed obvious to those working to cultivate interest in Canadian rugby; when it comes to attracting the average fan who knows little to nothing about the sport, matches in the vein of the recent RBS Six Nations kick-fest between France and Ireland aren’t likely to sustain much interest. It’s fair to say that tries—or at least the potential for tries—are the order of the day if rugby is to make inroads in Canada.
This is especially true given that sevens is starting to make an impact on the local sports landscape. When the HSBC Sevens World Series stops in Vancouver for the first time ever next year, it will put rugby on a bigger stage than it has possibly ever been in Canada. This means that the abbreviated game is going to offer a conspicuous entry point for Canadians who are curious about rugby in general.
The danger, however, is that potential crossover fans are being set up—traditionalists cover your eyes—to see XVs as plodding and dull.
Constant confusion over the laws at the scrum, rucks, mauls, and even offsides lines make the union game much less immediately accessible than sevens, and that’s before one even considers union’s epic 80-minute duration and general scarcity of tries. The 2013-14 SWS, for example, featured an average of 1 try every 74 seconds, compared to the Six Nations and Rugby Championship from that year which combined to produce only 1 try every 20 minutes.
In other words, a high-profile sevens tournament on Canadian ground is great news, but there is still a considerable leap to be made from hooking fans on sevens to getting them involved in XVs.
If that seems like an oversimplification, consider the ongoing debate about the entertainment value of the Six Nations. Ireland, for example have been taking constant heat in 2015 from local fans and media who feel the team is playing too conservatively. Nevermind that they are in pole position to win one of the premiere tournaments in rugby—and have won 10 games in a row overall—one of the main talking points remains the fact that the men from the Emerald Isle are dredging up only 1 try per game. When such grumbling can happen in a bred-in-the-bone rugby nation—particularly one in the northern hemisphere, where the tolerance for slower, more physical rugby is high—it doesn’t bode particularly well for the marketability of rugby in Canada.
Fortunately, World Rugby seems aware that it’s not enough to be content with maximizing their profitability in established countries. The old cliche “if you’re not evolving, you’re dying” seems to apply, and it’s the reason Italy and Argentina have been brought into the Tier 1 fold over the last 10 years, and why there is now so much focus on markets like the USA and Japan.
That being the case, it’s worth asking if the growth of rugby in non-traditional countries will be inhibited by the declining entertainment value lamented by Hansen and O’Driscoll. “Every breakdown is about slowing the ball down to the point where you can’t attack,” Hansen said. “Is that what rugby is about?”
Those of us in Canada who already love rugby know that’s the critical issue. Of course, the same old hurdles of geography and financing still apply and are never going away; however, if rugby’s speed and skill elements are truly on the wane, it only makes those hurdles even higher.
And in a country that largely views rugby as brutal, foreign, and just plain weird, being boring might be the biggest momentum-killer of all. Rugby may be too boring for Canadians
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