FEATURE 'Offence drives business': Why Gallagher Premiership shows the way for rugby

There was a golden period in the final round of Gallagher Premiership matches before the Six Nations.

As the light faded and dusk gradually drew in its evening cloak, four clubs – Bristol, Bath, Saracens and Exeter – accumulated 163 points and 22 tries between them, in the space of three hours of rugby. It is the kind of tally which used to represent a fair return for an entire round of Premiership play in England.

Whatever pain it may be experiencing off the field relating to its governance and business model, the traumatic reduction to 10 clubs has had a catalysing effect on the pitch. English clubs won 19 or their 32 matches in four rounds of the Champions Cup and six Premiership teams have advanced to the knockout stages of that competition. It is no different on the domestic scene, where a mere seven points separates second in the table from eighth. If the competition is bristling it is also high-scoring, with half a dozen sides averaging more than 3.5 tries per game.

In the larger frame, the fact such a scoring spree can occur in a traditionally conservative league represents a much-needed positive for the future of the game. It comes hot on the heels of a World Cup when the ultimate winners, South Africa, showed oodles of mental fortitude, but scored only one try in their last two games; and none at all in the final, despite enjoying a one-man advantage over New Zealand for most of the match.

The Springboks’ back-to-back World Cup victories raised questions about the game’s future as a spectacle, and as a marketable product with appeal to a wider audience. Those range from queries about the legality of a 7-1 bench split where forwards get stronger rather than weaker as the game progresses; through to use of scrum/maul to win penalties and score risk-free tries; the ferocity of collisions between ever-more powerful bodies, with the greater risk of injury that entails; and dominance of a risk-averse kick-and-rush formula suffocating the entertainment factor.

At one end of the spectrum was Australian ex-Scotland coach Matt Williams, now a regular pundit on Virgin Media Sport.

“What are you incentivising? By giving a penalty where you can take three points or kick for touch and start a maul, you are incentivising scrummaging to get the penalty. If you take that incentive away, well then – what’s the incentive?

“South Africa and England are like great tax accountants, they find every loophole and exploit it brilliantly. I admire the intellect, but that is not good for the global game.

“It is not good for the other sides in the game like France, New Zealand, and Ireland, who are trying to play a more positive, ball-in-hand, entertaining game. We are in the business of entertainment.

“Is it a 15-man game or an 8-man game? Right now, it has become so biased towards scrummaging and mauling. The game is totally out of balance.”

The head coach of Argentina, Michael Cheika, told very much the same story.

“The game has got a few issues it has got to sort out. I love rugby more than anything, and sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it because of what I see.

“I think the game is stopped far too much, it needs to flow more. There have been teams here who play great footy. The crowd want to see more of that.”

As always, the model for mature contact sports lies across the water in the Unites States. In the NFL, scoring has increased from an average of 39 points per game in 1970 to 51 in 2020. The curve of scoring has advanced even more steeply in basketball’s NBA. Here is the NBA executive vice-president of basketball strategy & analytics Evan Wasch, speaking on the Thinking Basketball podcast back in 2021:

“We do, not surprisingly, extensive fan surveys. We have even done dial testing, where fans are literally sitting watching games with a dial, turning it up or down based on whether they enjoy what they’re seeing. The overwhelming response is fans like the high scoring.”

The truth of contact sports in America can be summarised as ‘offence drives business’. The championship-winning Golden State Warriors are a case in point, as outlined in the following excerpt from a Sportico article.

“At their peak, from 2014-15 to 2016-17, Golden State’s offense was 6.97 points per 100 possessions better than league average, the best-ever among title-winning teams. From the season before that offensive explosion (2013-14) to the season after (2017-18), Forbes estimated the franchise’s value increased from $1.3 billion to $3.5 billion (169%), while the average franchise value only went up by 69%.”

In each of the 39 seasons between 1979-80 and 2017-18, the league-wide offensive rating [based on points scored per 100 possessions] fell inside of the narrow band between 102 and 109. Now it falls in the 116-point range.

Most rule changes in the two sports have favoured the attacking side. Offensive players are given more license, defensive players are more restricted in what they can do legally. That is how the NFL and NBA build their appeal through law-making. If it wants a bigger share of the sports broadcasting market, it is high time rugby followed suit.

The Premiership is something of a class leader in that respect. It may be dragging a heavy tail behind it with its business modelling off the field, but on it there is ample progress. Some coaches may distrust the stat, but the 2023-2024 Premiership is currently producing four more minutes of ball-in-play time than the World Cup. The percentage of ruck ball retained is higher, which means attacking sides build more of them per game – an average of 82 in the Premiership compared to 71 at the World Cup.

Led by a core of sympathetic referees in Waynes Barnes, Matt Carley and Luke Pearce, the league has done an excellent job of creating an attacking mindset. It is that mindset which resulted in the scoring explosion at Ashton Gate. Between them Bristol and Bath accrued 14 tries and shared 101 points in of all things, a pulsating West Country derby.

Bears head coach Pat Lam went all the way back to his roots in a deep dig for the counterattacking game. In his previous role at Connacht, he built a team which could run from anywhere, and this became the talisman of Bristol’s performance. The Bears ran all the first five kick-offs they received from Bath out of their own 22 by hand, making three clean breaks, drawing two yellow cards from their opponents, and scoring one try directly in the process.

That set the tone for the game – as Lam summarised in his TNT Sports interview midway through the second period: ‘No fear. Keep going.’ The opening try was scored as early as the ninth minute.

There is no true overlap when a long speculator is thrown out to left wing Gabriel Ibitoye in the first clip, but the Bears are content to use the width of the field to advance the ball to the 40m line, spread the line spacings in the Bath defence and create mismatches against the forwards on the next phase, with full-back Rich Lane breaking between Elliot Stooke and G.J. Van Velze to make the money-bust.

The attacking impetus generated from kick-off returns created a cascade effect of consequences.

The pass is recklessly flapped down by covering nine Louis Schreuder and that meant Bath’s second yellow card of the game, reducing the visitors to 13 men. Bristol developed more momentum by first building fake caterpillar rucks and then shifting the ball to width.

The Bath defence does not know whether it is coming or going, quite literally. The forwards are facing forwards but the backs are on the backpedal, expecting the kick.

The cascade effect did not end there. The impact of Bristol’s desire to run ball back from deep in their own half was profound: Bath switched to shorter restarts in the second period, creating more of a contest under the ball, ruling out the dispiriting and decelerating caterpillar ruckàbox-kick drag, and opening more immediate attacking opportunities for both sides.

If Bristol could run the ball back out of their own 22, why not Bath with Finn Russell at 10? Suddenly, supporters from both sides were pressing their buzzers and turning up their ‘happy’ dials in appreciation.

Those who live the sword may also die by it, but surely that is acceptable collateral risk for a game which badly needs a bigger share of the sports broadcasting and sponsorship market?

Contact sports in the United States have shown the way, now it is up to rugby to follow it.

That does not mean the death of defence or forward play – far from it. But it would mean fewer stoppages, more fluid links in play, fewer scrum penalties [there was only one in the Bristol-Bath game] and more desire to ‘play from anywhere’. The Premiership is one league rounding on its past and gesturing towards the future. As Pat Lam implies, the whole rugby world is waiting: ‘No fear, keep going’.