Watched Eastern Counties v. East Midlands yesterday. My thoughts:
The game was played at a blistering pace, breakdowns were quicker albeit they looked a lot less coordinated at times. There wasn't a single unplayable all game, but I think this was partially due to the players often unnecessarily offloading in the tackle due to fear of having an unplayable. Through the gate was rigidly applied, the transition phase was a bit hurried throughout though. There was one occasion of a boot on body (from what I could see), in order to try and free the ball, caused a bit of an injury to the party who was on the receiving end. As it was, they got pinged (correctly IMO) for not rolling away. Overall, I agree with Mike that there needs to be more consistency there as to how it is all interpreted, but I will come on to this in a bit.
Collapsing the maul worked very well, 9 mauls in the first half were all collapsed, and the ball recycled on every occasion. Mauls went a lot less distance than before. No safety issues arose.
5m back from the scrum seemed to work OK, though it was interesting to see it hadn't been fully thought through by the teams, with East Mids conceding a penalty of the first scrum when the No. 8 picked up and went, taking the 12with him who was running wide. He got tackled, but the 12 continued the line expecting the pass, overran the tackle situation and left the 8 isolated with the oppo 12 and 13 over him. He got pinged for being isolated. The other noticeable thing was how the backs were taking a lot of stationary ball, the 10 often receiving the ball while standing still, not running onto it, and as such often failing to fully make the yards that the space may have allowed him to.
Only once was the ball passed back into the 22, and it was run, so that law had no effect.
The interesting thing is the discussion we had early on this week about the wording of the Laws. The impression I got is that they are actually quite loosely worded at the minute, leaving a lot of scope for interpretational differences to arise. While they have narrowed it down a bit more than the RFU circular on the Community Rugby website, it is slightly surprising that they would choose to leave some freedom in the Laws. It would seem to me that it would reduce the benefits of getting useful feedback if there isn't a concrete law to get feedback upon. It was also interesting to see what went on from the officiating perspective. The marshalling of the 5m back of the scrum was done by the TJs, though it was interesting that on occasions both went the same direction, and other times one each way. It seemed to work much better one each way, and one can only assume it was the time it took to get used to it that was the issue there.
Anyway, all in all the variations seemed to work relatively well. The breakdown one looks the most controversial/messy/unclear one at the moment, and it will be interesting to see if teams develop some strategies to use the open space at scrums. Time will tell....
