Rugby: IRB fiddling as game burns out

I stood out on the deck late one night. I sipped from a glass of good merlot. The dog snuffled round my leg, wondering what I was doing. I glanced up into the night sky; transfixed by the stars, glittering like little diamonds on a sheet of black velvet.

I watched the moon, like a great wheel of brie, and the lights of an air liner tracking across it - one of mankind's most remarkable inventions and it looked like a midge against the face of the celestial moon. I looked out over the quiet, gleaming waters of the Waitemata Harbour. I drank in all this majesty and I thought: "I bet the bloody IRB still stuff rugby up next year".

As the 2009 season comes to an end, the game of rugby is perhaps at its lowest ebb ever, in spite of the All Blacks' performance against France in that terrific test match.

God bless the IRB. They govern world rugby, you know. Well, sort of. They govern world rugby rather like North West Gas in that true story in the Daily Telegraph from a few years ago.

A Mr Arthur Purdey had complained about an unusually large gas bill and a spokesman from NWG responded: "We agree it's rather high for the time of year. It's possible Mr Purdey has been charged for the gas used up during the explosion which destroyed his house."

The IRB, by refusing to change the laws that threaten to paralyse rugby, are overseeing the leaking of support from the game they are supposed to safeguard - and, like the fumes which leaked from Mr Purdey's house, worse could be to follow.

What's provoked all this is that I chanced upon a column written five years ago, almost to the day. Well, I was having a bit of a tidy-up round my desk.

It was a bit depressing (the column, not the tidy-up; I found a $2 coin). The column I wrote back in 2004 took the mickey out of an upcoming BIRB meeting to consider changes to the laws of the game.

I won't inflict the whole thing on you otherwise we'll all be feeling like rushing into the path of the nearest Anchor milk tanker - but it poked fun at the horror that was (and is) the tackled ball rule and the mess it produced.

Five long years later and the bloody IRB (I call them the BIRB now; that extra B is highly expressive, isn't it?) have had another meeting on the rules and have done sod-all to rid rugby of its ills. In fact, they've made them worse. A great game has taken a couple more stately steps towards extinction.

Five years after that column, the BIRB have added to the tackled ball schemozzle, rules that have promoted the god-awful, soul-searing kicking that bores us all rigid.

The BIRB have fiddled with the game, rather in the manner of a chimpanzee inspecting a Rolex watch and leaving it with its little innards hanging out.

Rugby is now generally as entertaining as a concrete wall. Its core activity seems to be annoying its fans. I've been a fan since I started playing at 5 but now, faced with a choice between watching most rugby and plunging my genitals into a vat of boiling chip fat, the vat is getting serious consideration.

The All Blacks might even have done the game a disservice with that bravura performance in Marseille. Some misguided folk were moved to say that it goes to show the BIRB's new rules aren't to blame; that two sides determined to play can produce a spectacle.

That's like saying that that nice British PM, Neville Chamberlain, could have prevented World War II had he only poured Hitler more cups of tea.

It takes two to tango, you see. We all know that if the All Blacks were playing the French tomorrow, they'd be back to kicking, standing up offside and smothering the ABs, lying over the ball and committing a couple of atrocities in the rucks and mauls.

But now people in the Northern Hemisphere are also thinking that the game is boring - especially after the England-All Blacks game where they saw a great rugby nation reduced to playing safe because of the stupid, mindless laws foisted on the game.

Yes, folks, the same Poms who shouted down the ELVs (designed to brighten the game) as evil, heinous things sent from hell to seduce right-thinking Britons, are now campaigning for changes to the laws.

Even Stephen Jones, the gobby Welshman who so enjoys winding up Kiwis, has joined the clamour. He's actually a nice bloke, Stephen, even though he has one of those accents that allows the bearer to say stupid things while sounding very clever; and his writing achieves tedious levels of pomposity as he blindly defends a Northern Hemisphere game about as attractive as dysentery.

On the subject of the ELVs he was so rabid, you would have liked to have sent him an envelope full of dog ordure. No, that wasn't me ...

All of this makes you think the BIRB is an organisation full of Hooray Henrys; the sort of disconnected, high-accented toffs for whom a creche is something that happens on the motorway.

But it's not right. The BIRB are truly multi-cultural. One Graham Mourie is head of the committee that polices the laws and recommends changes. Graham Mourie ... one of the thinkers and best No 7s in the history of the game, never mind the All Blacks. Huh. Go figure.

It's at this point you feel, as David Brent of The Office once said: "... the key of despair sliding into the lock of apathy; the knob of mediocrity turning slowly, opening the door of despondency."

That's because, five years on, it seems the BIRB may never get it right. The structures of the game are too set in stone.

The ability or even the willingness of the world's governing body to throw the whole mess out of the window and start again seems muted. Moves are being made by the IRB but they are glacial. The audience is going to sleep.

Argentina, the third best side at the last World Cup, still do not take part in a meaningful competition; there are still second- and third-tier squads put together by major nations for tours about which no one cares; they still play meaningless tests with rotated players - when they are not being rested from a punishing test match schedule which reduces the international calendar to a clogged conglomeration. Less, as Sean Fitzpatrick has been arguing, is definitely more.

When rugby went professional in 1996, the establishment beat off a bid by a rebel outfit to control the reins of world rugby. Andy Haden often says it - maybe the wrong blokes won.

A revolution is needed so I've penned some letters to the richest men in the world - Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch and others - suggesting they might want to buy a used global sport.

I didn't include that nice Larry Ellison bloke as he's spent so much on that America's Cup thingy; perhaps the only sport on the planet to mummify its fans more than rugby.

Maybe someone will help. The IRB don't seem interested.