The danger of jumping

Portnoy's Complaint wrote:The only way to discover if a consensus is reached will be by starting a new poll.

Maddog wrote:Don't want to flog a dead horse, but Anyone else watching rugby club and see Nigel Owens not really talk about the red card? I'd have thought if he agreed he would have back his fellow referee up. Pure speculation really just thought it was interesting!

quinsforever wrote:

Maddog wrote:Don't want to flog a dead horse, but Anyone else watching rugby club and see Nigel Owens not really talk about the red card? I'd have thought if he agreed he would have back his fellow referee up. Pure speculation really just thought it was interesting!

u need to follow the debate. IRB regs preclude refs from commenting on the decisions of other refs. at all. was quoted about 5 pages back.

Notch wrote:

LondonTiger wrote:

Notch wrote:I think he will win a number of caps and be at the next World Cup. I also think the position he'll play will be outside centre not fullback

Can he play outside centre for Ireland and stay at Ulster?

I hope so. I envisage that the IRFU will twist our arm to play him there more often. Then problem is we don't have any other fullbacks as good.

Poorfour wrote:

The Great Aukster wrote:
Sorry Poorfour but you are the one playing semantics. You suggest that the award of a penalty can not take into account the circumstances it happened in and then contradict yourself by saying that "materiality" allows the referee to do exactly that. I am not familiar with referee speak and such fabricated words obviously are designed for inner circle use only.

This isn't an exercise in debating one-up-man-ship, it is a discussion about the Law and what it is intended to do in relation to player safety. As far as I can see the only outcome from this whole episode is for coaches to tell their players to always jump when taking the high ball to avoid the wrath of the referee. If a player wants to catch a high ball he will have to run to get in the right place and keep his eyes on it in order to catch it - therefore he should always jump in case he has missed a player in his blindspot.

So the Law and this ruling encourages players to run and jump, and therefore there will be more one on one aerial collisions. The result is that two players rather than one could be falling from a height and therefore the risk of injury is doubled. The ruling today in my view could lead to more injuries rather than less and that is why the Law is not fit for purpose.

As for a Law change, that would require the acceptance that there is a problem first, before debating how it can be improved.

OK, giving you the benefit of the doubt, we may have been using the word "context" differently. "Context", to me, is very broad term meaning "anything and everything that might be relevant to the event." In particular, it includes what led up to the event. "Materiality" is narrow and specific: "did this event have any bearing on fairness or safety", which is different from "context" in my mind and even different from "outcome" (e.g. a no-arm tackle might not lead to an injury, but it is still dangerous and illegal).

I am sorry if "Materiality" isn't a word you're familiar with. It is, as the Simpsons would have it, perfectly cromulent where I come from. As far as I can tell it's a pretty common legal concept that's also gained wide currency in business. It's also not that hard to work out what it means from the derivation. Given that it's introduced as a refereeing concept in the Entry Level Referee Award, which is the basic training that every ref does to get their whistle and cards (literally - in England you are supplied with both as part of the course), it's not exactly exclusive to some secret brotherhood of elite referees.

As far as I can see, the outcome from this episode is far less dramatic. I was going to say that "Coaches will remind players to expect an opposition jumper in the air when they chase a ball and to allow for that if they decide not to jump", but actually that's stupid. Players already know this. So one of the Ulster coaches will slap Jared Payne round the head and tell him to be a bit more careful next time, he'll try to remember that, and in a few weeks' time everyone will start to forget this. If we are lucky, referees will be reminded to apply the laws and directives.

And you know what? In most cases two players WILL jump for the ball. Just like they did after most contested kicks last week, and the week before. And there will be fewer injuries, not more, because players in the air are decelerating and their centres of gravity are at about the same height. In the vast majority of times where there is contact, both of them will land feet downwards, because physics.

The reason we've had to debate this in such detail is that it's a rare event, but it's not the rugby equivalent of the Derek Bentley case. I don't accept that the law needs to be changed, because, imperfect as it is, I can see why it has been defined that way and I am happy that it generally works the right way, and that it did so in this case. I'd be open to debating positive suggestions for how it could be improved, though.