Bonus points in rugby – the system whereby, alongside the four points awarded for a win and the two points awarded for a draw, an extra point is awarded to those who score four tries in a single game and those who lose by seven or less – were first introduced for the New Zealand domestic competition in 1995. Since then the system has been adopted by every major rugby competition around the world, both domestic and international. Every tournament, that is, except the Six Nations. Yesterday that changed: the Six Nation committee announced that it would be trialling bonus points for the 2017 tournament.
The arguments in favour of the system are straightforward. Compared to the free-flowing, high-scoring attacking rugby of the southern hemisphere, northern hemisphere rugby can be a dour, attritional, low-scoring affair. A bonus point system, its supporters claim, would not only incentivise attacking play and make the game more fun to watch, it would also help keep games close by giving losing teams a reason to hang on. It’s already used in all of world’s major tournaments, and it certainly hasn’t made the likes of Super Rugby, the Rugby Championship, the Pro 12, the Premiership, the Top 14, or the European Rugby Cup any less exciting.
So what’s the problem? Some of the objections are a little philosophical. For example, it seems only natural that a team which wins more games than a league rival should finish above them. Under the bonus point system, however, it is possible for a team to win fewer games than an opponent and yet still finish in a higher position. The bonus point system meant that Ireland’s Leinster, for example, spent large sections of last year’s Pro 12 ahead of teams who had won more games. The manner of the result ends up becoming more important than the result itself – winning a game, theoretically the be all and end all, becomes devalued. Running up huge scores against weaker sides (and thereby winning the maximum five points) becomes more important than a close win over a much stronger rival (which may pick you up as little as a net two point gain, if they stay within seven and pick up four tries in the process).
Under the Six Nations committee’s proposals, Grand Slam winners would at least be guaranteed the title. But a team that won four games without a bonus point and drew the fifth (in other words, a hugely impressive unbeaten side) would finish below a team that had won three with a bonus point while losing the remaining two with two losing bonus points. That hardly seems fair.
Which leads us into the second issue. Defenders of the bonus point system take it as a truism that attacking rugby is inherently more valuable than defensive play. They argue that it’s more entertaining watching teams run in tries all day than it is to watch a team put in an impressive defensive effort. But defence is as vital an aspect of rugby as attack, and often no less heroic. Take the 2015 tournament, where Wales put themselves in Championship contention after an incredible second half performance against Ireland, during which they held out for nearly ten minutes against a relentless Irish attack which lasted over 30 phases. A backs-against-the-wall defensive effort can be just as thrilling as a length-of-the-pitch try.
They’re the moral objections. But the most significant issue with the proposed bonus point system is a more practical one, to do with the way the Six Nations is structured. Each team in the tournament plays only five games each, once against each other side. Unlike most tournaments, there is no home and away leg. Each team, depending on a fixture list which alternates year by year, plays three home games and two away games, or vice versa. Naturally, there’s an advantage to playing at home – teams tend to win by more and lose by less in front of a home crowd – and so even as it currently stands the tournament is skewed in favour of whichever team is lucky enough to have more of a home advantage each year. A bonus point system would only make that skew worse.
And here’s the thing – would it even work? Would it turn the Six Nations into a bastion of free-flowing attacking rugby? The stats indicate that actually it wouldn’t necessarily make much of a difference. In the 2016 Six Nations, there were an average of 4.73 tries a match. In the southern hemisphere’s Rugby Championship the same year, with bonus points in effect, it was 5.83 a match. In 2015, a year where the Six Nations was derided for its low try count, the difference was 4.13 in the north and 5.5 in the South. In 2014, the average count was only 4.07 and 4.17 respectively. The grittiness of northern hemisphere rugby as compared to the south is often over-exaggerated, and what advantage the south does possess can be attributed as much to better skills teaching and weather as to bonus point laws.
Over the years there have been a host of tweaks applied to rugby’s rules to make the game more approachable, many of which – such as increasing the value of a try from four points to five in 1992 – have been highly successful in encouraging a more dynamic, fast-moving game. Tradition can be the enemy of progress, and the various rugby federations should absolutely be willing to make changes where necessary in order to improve the flow of the game (indeed, a serious review of the scrum, an increasingly broken aspect of rugby union, is firmly needed).
But anyone who watched the final day of the 2015 Six Nations, when four teams were in contention for the title, 27 tries were scored, and the championship was ultimately decided by a points difference of 6, will know that this is not a tournament that needs to be made more exciting. Similarly Wales would have missed out on the championship in 2013 despite thumping England on the final day, simply because they didn’t win the “right” way by scoring enough tries. England’s higher bonus point total would have taken a thrilling finale and turned it into a damp squib. Someone needs to let the Six Nations committee know that if it ain’t broke, they shouldn’t fix it.
The Mongoose 