Scrap rugby’s 48-hour team announcement rule

A prominent UK publication has a cool, if somewhat crude, weekly feature before the weekend’s English Premier League action.

It’s a predicted starting line-up and formation for every match, essentially a graphic with a collection of dots symbolising the players.

Generally, the writers get it wrong, but there are occasions where they get it right, as well.

Nonetheless, I certainly have fun browsing it and would relish doing it.

It illustrates one of the time-honoured fun traditions of soccer: the curious, even anxious wait to see what your favourite team’s run-on combination will look like.

Indeed, match squads are only announced about two hours before kick-off.

A few weeks ago, a seasoned sports journalist who nowadays runs his own Facebook-based rugby “news” service, complained about the Free State Cheetahs ignoring the protocol that their match squad needed to be announced 48 hours before a Currie Cup meeting with the Lions.

It was a tad ironic given that the Lions earlier this year also caused a stir by announcing a match day 23 that was significantly different to the one that actually played against the Chiefs in Hamilton.

Lions CEO Rudolf Straeuli subsequently said that it was a tactic to deceive their opponents … and it worked as they won 23-17.

Now, it’s perfectly fine to argue that rules are rules.

But rugby is already dogged by its complicated laws and inconsistent citing procedures. The last thing it needs is to start cultivating unnecessary bickering over whether a coach names his team two days before kick-off.

There’s no way that an accomplished coach is reliant on an opposition team sheet to formulate and finalise his own tactics.

Scrapping the 48-hour rule will add some much-needed intrigue to the game. It will allow us fans to continue speculating about what the team will look like.

And it also adds to the spectacle that is the game itself, knowing that the teams need to adapt just that little bit more because they, hopefully, didn’t quite expect that starting team.

After all, professional sport is all about adaptability.

Heinz Schenk.

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