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'This is a great decision': Red card rules changed for The Rugby Championship

By AAP
(Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images)

The 20-minute red card will be used during the Rugby Championship after SANZAAR decided to reintroduce the law trial.

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The ruling has been used for the past three Super Rugby seasons and in last year’s Rugby Championship but has so far been rejected by World Rugby for a global trial with July Tests played under traditional rules.

Allowing red-carded players to be replaced after 20 minutes, southern hemisphere teams are continuing to push for its acceptance and will use it to gather more supporting evidence through the upcoming series that involves Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina.

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“This is a great decision for The Rugby Championship and follows on from its application in Super Rugby,” SANZAAR boss Brendan Morris said.

“As a group we firmly believe the integrity of international matches is very important and that wherever possible matches must be a contest of 15 versus 15.”

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Morris said SANZAAR collectively felt the 20-minute red card was a significant deterrent to deliberate acts of foul play while not ruining the game’s spectacle.

However northern hemisphere organisations feel it’s dangerous and not enough of a punishment to drive behavioural and coaching change.

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“SANZAAR stands alongside World Rugby’s important work on managing foul play and player welfare and will conduct a formal research project across the 2022 TRC period with all comparative findings to be shared with World Rugby at the end of the season,” Morris said.

“The aim is to gather the necessary information that allows the 20-minute red card trial to be accepted into the full laws of the game in the future.”

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Flankly 16 hours ago
The AI advantage: How the next two Rugby World Cups will be won

If rugby wants to remain interesting in the AI era then it will need to work on changing the rules. AI will reduce the tactical advantage of smart game plans, will neutralize primary attacking weapons, and will move rugby from a being a game of inches to a game of millimetres. It will be about sheer athleticism and technique,about avoiding mistakes, and about referees. Many fans will find that boring. The answer is to add creative degrees of freedom to the game. The 50-22 is an example. But we can have fun inventing others, like the right to add more players for X minutes per game, or the equivalent of the 2-point conversion in American football, the ability to call a 12-player scrum, etc. Not saying these are great ideas, but making the point that the more of these alternatives you allow, the less AI will be able to lock down high-probability strategies. This is not because AI does not have the compute power, but because it has more choices and has less data, or less-specific data. That will take time and debate, but big, positive and immediate impact could be in the area of ref/TMO assistance. The technology is easily good enough today to detect forward passes, not-straight lineouts, offside at breakdown/scrum/lineout, obstruction, early/late tackles, and a lot of other things. WR should be ultra aggressive in doing this, as it will really help in an area in which the game is really struggling. In the long run there needs to be substantial creativity applied to the rules. Without that AI (along with all of the pro innovations) will turn rugby into a bash fest.

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