Rugby Union / Ralph Ellis / 03 September 2008 / 1 Comments

New laws designed to encourage attacking rugby will make a considerable difference to tactics when the Guinness Premiership season gets under way, says Ralph Ellis

Eamon Dunphy is best known as the ghost writer ofRoy Keane´s autobiography. He was the scribe who came up with the brutally frank account of how Keane deliberately made the high tackle which effectively ended Alf Inge Haaland´s career - hence the deliciously comical scenario where Keane claimed he´d been misquoted in his own autobiography.

But long before that, Dunphy produced a far better work of sporting literature when he published his own account of a season as a journeyman Millwall player in the early 1970s. It contained a wonderful account of a training session when the club´s coach had decided the team were playing too many safety-first passes and not trying to dribble past an opponent often enough. In the morning seven-a-side match, he created a rule that no team could score a goal unless they had first dribbled past a player. A good idea - except both sides quickly cottoned on that if you just ran away from whoever had the ball the opposition could never score and the whole session descended into farce.

As a story it made the point that however hard the lawmakers try to change the rules to make any sport more exciting, the people who play it will immediately find a way to bend those rules to their advantage and almost certainly make it worse as a spectacle in the process.

That´s something which Rugby Union is likely to find out in the next few weeks as the Guinness Premiership season starts with some of the most drastic rule changes in the history of the game. Put simply mauls may now be collapsed, lineout numbers are unlimited, and at the scrummage the offside line is five metres behind the hindmost foot. And ground may not be gained by kicks made after a side have taken the ball back into their own 22.

That is going to make a considerable difference to the tactics and form of the game, and it means the Premiership won´t settle down for a month or two until you learn which clubs have adapted to the rule changes best. Last year´s winners London Wasps are currently [3.8] favourites to win the Grand Final again, but in this morning´s Daily Express rugby writer Steve Bale quite rightly highlights that there will be no guarantees that even their director of rugby Ian McGeechan will be quickest to master the new laws. In fact McGeechan himself is admitting that to retain the title would be every bit as great an achievement as last year when he had to play without his internationals for the first two months. And Rob Andrew admits the changes so far have meant far more kicking in the game - the complete opposite of what was intended.

Eddie Jones, coach of Saracens who are among the half dozen most fancied clubs at odds of [10.0] to be regular season winners, says: "We have a whole new set of laws that have been picked up out of a cornflakes packet." And London Irish coach Toby Booth is bemoaning the fact that his team´s greatest strength at the driving line-out has effectively been neutered. That makes Wasps pretty much a certainty at [1.4] to win their first game against Irish - whether they go on to be champions again will be an entirely different matter

Five things you might not know about London Wasps

1. The original Wasps club was formed in 1867 because of a split in the membership of Hampstead football club. The other side formed was Harlequins

2. The club were founder members of the Football Association but not the Rugby Football Union even though they were entitled to be. Legend says the secretary went to the wrong pub for the meeting!
3. They were the first champions of the professional era and moved home first to Loftus Road and then to their current base at Wycombe
4. Their old Sudbury ground has been redeveloped for housing, but the old clubhouse building remains and is used as a Hindu community centre
5. When James Haskell, Joe Worsley and Tom Rees played against Wales in last year´s Six Nations it was the first time one club had supplied the entire back row for England.