During the amateur era, when the Championship was the Five Nations, each team consisted of only eight forwards and seven backs, who competed for the entire 80 minutes.
Cuts, dislocated fingers and broken noses were mostly ignored as a matter of principle. Players would only leave the field if they suffered a serious injury.
It was the foundation of the joke that soccer is 90 minutes pretending that you are injured, while rugby is 80 minutes pretending that you are not.
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In each round of the Five Nations, only 40 forwards and 35 backs competed in a numerically relatively even balance between the two units.
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During that era, in 1984 on Sydney University Oval, I witnessed how a broken spine can shatter a life, when my clubmate, Grant Harper, a tight head prop, became a quadriplegic after a disastrous scrum engagement.
The horrors of that day are seared into the memories of all who witnessed that tragedy.
Grant’s was one of many horrific spinal injuries across the 1980s that forced administrators to change many laws to make the scrum safe. One law change was the creation of a reserve bench of trained props and hookers who were on standby as a safety measure to ensure competitive scrums could safely continue if there were an injury to a starting front rower.
Well-considered law changes that reduced the impact of scrum engagements and converted technical scrum infringements to free kicks and not penalties diluted the motivation for brutal scrummaging tactics. The wisdom of those in stewardship of the game during those difficult days all but eliminated the danger of spinal injury in scrums.
Over the following decades, law changes have once again empowered aggressive scrummaging to the point that the balance between the ethos that rugby is a game for every body shape and the short-term competitive demands of winning games at any cost has been lost.
The reserve bench, which was introduced as a safety law to protect players' spines in the 1980s, has metamorphosed into an instrument that has drastically reduced the number of backline players who can participate in the game and fuelled match-defining power to scrummaging that lawmakers in the 1980s could never have foreseen.
In last weekend’s round of the Six Nations, the teams selected a combined total of 82 forwards and only 56 backs. The mass of technical penalties that scrums now produce has motivated coaches to exploit a loophole in laws surrounding the reserves bench to drastically increase the number of tight five forwards and to greatly reduce the opportunity for backs to participate.
The rugby public has become so desensitised to 7-1 and 6-2 benches that they now hardly rate comment. St Augustine said: “Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.”
Even though 7-1 and 6-2 benches are now common, they remain unjust and dangerous. At World Rugby’s council meeting last November, they should have been legislated into the history books, alongside the spinal injuries that brought the bench into existence.
From 40 forwards and 35 backs in the 1980s to 82 forwards and 56 backs last weekend tells us a story that rugby has embraced brute physicality at the expense of refined skill. If all the Six Nations teams decided to move to a 7-1 split on their bench, which remains possible and legal, there would be 90 forwards selected and only 48 backline players. If all the teams in the URC selected a 6-2 split on their bench there would be 224 forwards and only 144 backs in the competition.
[ Twenty-minute red card undermines World Rugby’s campaign to make the game saferOpens in new window ]
This imbalance has leached down into the lower levels of the game, once again creating the environment for a potential spinal disaster.
Last weekend Scotland selected a 6-2 bench. Gregor Townsend rolled the dice and when Finn Russell accidentally collided with Darcy Graham it came up “snake eyes.”
Scotland did not have a replacement outhalf with only two backs on the bench. At that moment the game was effectively over. Rugby’s laws protect the scrum to such an extreme extent that if a team loses two hookers to injury or suspension and they do not have a third trained hooker in their team, they are forced to remove another player from the field as punishment and continue with only 13 players. This happened to Italy at the Aviva in 2022. Yet rugby’s bench laws do not protect the integrity of backline players or the game itself, by insisting that a minimum of three suitably trained backs must be on the bench.
World Rugby often speaks of “the fan experience”. Rugby supporters want to watch backline players such as Antoine Dupont, Louis Bielle-Biarrey and Cheslin Kolbe. They do not want to experience more scrum penalties and mauls.
The practice of selecting a 7-1 or a 6-2 bench and replacing seven or six forwards only minutes into the second half also has many concussion experts concerned that the introduction of several huge, fresh athletes against fatigued opposition increases the chances of brain injury.
St Augustine went on to say: “The truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.” The lack of justice in the ratio of numbers between backs and forwards and the alarm being sounded by concussion experts should speak for itself but somehow the World Rugby Council are not listening.
While the horrors of the spinal injuries of the 1980s were solved through wisdom and a collective purpose by informed administrators, the scourge of brain injury through multiple concussions and its relationship with the size, number and timing of the introduction of bench players has either not been adequately considered by the World Rugby Council or, far worse, has been ignored because some nations believe the current laws are advantageous to the success of their national team.
The World Rugby Council consists of an unwieldy 52 representatives and requires a 75 per cent vote of support to change any law. A deeply flawed design for an instrument of reform. The rumours of a cabal of nations within the council, who use political influence to block reforms to scrums and replacement laws are rife. So the injustice inflicted on backline players remains unchanged.
World Rugby has stewardship, not ownership of the game. With that stewardship comes responsibility. A responsibility that some on the council appear to be neglecting.
