• Former Pom Hooker Suggests Eliminating Rugby Conversions

    This is often the day for retrospectives of the year concluding, but for reasons yet to reveal themselves, we find ourselves looking ahead more than in past years, so we will merely thank 2019 for the mostly good year that it was and look forward to 2020.

    We do not intend to throw predictions about sports outcomes in 2020, but we have seen, over the past few years, perhaps the entire decade, a trend in sports to adapt to the pace of life, a pace that has accelerated as delayed gratification has been replaced with instant gratification.

    We are speaking our course, about efforts to shorten sports contests to better match our shortening attention spans.

    Whenever pro sports leagues have their annual meetings to plan for the next season, the topic of speeding up games is omnipresent.

    Since New Zealanders are keen on rugby, we found the proposal by former England hooker Brian more interesting.

    Moore favours the elimination of conversions and make tries worth seven points.

    He made mention of the length of time teams were given to attempt conversions, stating that eliminating conversions would save as many as five minutes during a typical game.

    Ignoring Sevens for the moment, Moore questions the difficulty of converting from tries scored near the corners.

    Most football fans would agree that a try scored is better than a try unscored. The aspect of the game that makes it easier to score wide, with the resulting conversion being more difficult is an aspect that we feel adds an important tactical element to the game and demands precision from conversion kickers.

    Given the chance, a player on a break with a clear path to the line will do everything possible to move the cross closer to the posts.

    The “Interminable breaks in play that could be eradicated to make watching more enjoyable,” in Moore’s words, but as we have matured, by which we mean gotten older, breaks in the action give us the perfect amount of time to hit the loo and grab a fresh tinny.

    That, combined with the fact that a minute is already shorten than it used to be, has us resisting Moore’s proposal, while at the same time, making us exceedingly grateful that once the rugby starts, the clock ticks, unlike the NFL, where the clock stops far more often than it runs.