New Six Nations plan concocted during Selkirk Sevens chinwag - my plan to make rugby better

The English top flight, recently reduced to nine clubs after the bankruptcy of Wasps and Worcester, is supposed to be intensely competitive, but such scores are ridiculous. These matches can’t really have been much fun to watch. Too one-sided, no real contest. No doubt there were extenuating circumstances in both games, but sport that isn’t a contest is only a glorified exhibition. Most of the memorable matches are close, sometimes low scoring ones. There were only two tries – one for each side – in the never-to-be-forgotten 1990 Grand Slam match at Murrayfield between Scotland and England.

I sometimes think that too many tries are scored now, or at least that it may be too easy to score a try. I suppose that somewhere I could find, in these days of stats, what percentage of tries are scored from a five-metre rolling maul. A pretty high one I would wager, give that hookers now seem to score, or be credited with, more tries than wing-threequarters. Of course, we cheer when it’s our side, moan when the try is scored against us, but, though organising and effecting a rolling maul clearly requires skill and lots of training, it all often seems just a bit routine and dull. I used to think the same about pushover tries from the set scrum, but these are less common than used to be the case, probably because of the way scrums are refereed now.

We were talking about such matters at the Selkirk Sevens last Saturday. There’s a lot of time for talk on a Sevens afternoon, especially when two team you know very little about are on the field. We were talking about the Six Nations and agreed that Georgia should be admitted to make it seven. Then I remarked that besides this seeming fair to Georgia, it would make the tournament better balanced since everyone would then have three home games and three away ones. Given that teams generally have a better home record than their away one, it would be interesting to consult the figures over the years and work out how how often the title went to a country with three homes games. Some keen young statisticians might look at the history of the Six Nations – 2000 to 2024 – and find out how often the title has gone to a team with only two away matches and therefore three at home.

Home advantage matters – we won our own Selkirk Sevens last week – though, naively, I suppose it might matter less when rugby went professional and players, at least in Scotland and Ireland were accustomed to playing on foreign lands than they were in the amateur days. This wasn’t the case in Wales since the top clubs had a history of intensely fought matches across the Border with England. Still it’s evidently very important that Glasgow get enough from their last two league games – in South Africa today and then at home to Zebre in order to ensure having home advantage in the semi-final…

Still, given the reality of home advantage in rugby, here’s a thought; a home try should remain as it is, worth five points, but an away one should score six. A nice idea says I – but I doubt if it will fly. Still, it might have more to commend it than the present system of bonus points. It seems to me ridiculous – and also I surmise to others – that a team that has been losing by a wide margin should collect a losing bonus point for scoring a third and fourth try in the last minutes of a game when their opponents have shuffled their squad and relaxed because they are 30 or forty points up.

Well, I have never found much solace in the so-called consolation try when you have been well beaten though I suppose it is better than a slap on the face with a wet fish, better anyway than losing 90-0 like poor Gloucester last week. In the early years of what was then the Heineken Cup, Leicester ran up that sort of score at home to Glasgow. One felt for the supporters who has travelled south.