Six Nations bonus points: Bonuses for mates

I am ashamed, on behalf of the Six Nations (which they won’t be too bothered about), that they have decreed bonus points are of more consequence than Georgian rugby. 

A while ago, I wrote about Georgia being absorbed into the Six Nations. It seems that, despite the recent articulate and desperate lamentations of the Georgian set-up, the Six Nations has decided that bonus points are more important than the expansion of the tournament. I hope you will forgive me for using a political analogy, but in a year when we have seen Brexit and Trump, it seems that the Six Nations too has decided that exclusivity and populist change are more important than inclusivity and growth. 

The tournament, as it was in 2016, works. It has produced some stunning finishes, incredible drama and serious stories to tell. Do we need to score more tries in the tournament? Was the Grand Slam finish not enough? 

Ed Kerr and I were at Twickenham when England went on their mad points difference offensive against France. They nearly pulled it off. We agreed that it was a stellar finish, a great game – though anomalous and bizarre. Now, however, would a team pursue further tries after scoring four? Would a team, in their final fixture, not bother to pursue scoring tries, knowing that as long as a Grand-Slam-chasing side lost their final fixture, they would win the tournament? It is, in many ways, pointless to ask these questions. But if we are to look to that anomalous game against France as proof of needing bonus points, then we must think of similar anomalous scenarios in which the bonus point system would seem redundant or to have created a loophole of some description. The reality is that teams go out to score tries. They go out to win games. Adding a bonus point muddies the message of what the Six Nations is about. You go out to win. A slugfest in sub-zero temperatures and icy rain is fine – rugby is a sport for all weathers. 

Chasing four tries, I have to confess, has begun to feel a little formulaic anyway. We don’t want rugby to go the way of 50 overs cricket – a series of expected moves and systems producing a game plan where if you don’t hit the normal and expected targets then you fail. There often isn’t a positive attitude. If a four-try bonus becomes the norm, then how long before it gets bumped up to five? Or six? Don’t get me wrong, I am far from an anti-revolutionary, but I think that if the game gets stale, which seems to be the suggestion given this, then we look for other methods to improve the playing of it. Why are bonus points not awarded for points difference within a game, rather than scoring four tries? I watched Saracens win by scoring a mere 20 points but get the bonus. Why should a team who win 20-19 get five league points but not a side who win 36-0 but didn’t score four tries? 

Either way, my main argument here is not so much that the inclusion of the bonus point rule happened. It is more than that. It is stronger and angrier than that. Why has this rule been included before Georgia? It is shameful, genuinely, wholeheartedly shameful. The Six Nations has put television ratings, sponsorship, excitement, video compilations and boozed-up kick-booing fools ahead of the development of a Rugby Federation that have consistently and constantly proven themselves worthy of a place in European rugby’s great tradition. Every World Cup, and here I feel I am repeating myself, we find ourselves going “Georgia are a proper side now, maybe people will start to take them seriously.” And yet it is only in World Cup and the occasional Autumn Test that we see this otherwise invisible side. 

The Six Nations seems to me to be worrying far too much about its aesthetic, and not enough about its soul.

Filed under: Six Nations
Written by: Peter Randall
Follow: @uxbridgewolf · @therugbymag