WHILE RUGBY FANS heard all about shot clocks and 20-minute red cards coming into this Autumn Nations Series, a new directive to referees concerning the laws around kicking has flown in under the radar. Basically, match officials have been told by World Rugby that they needed to clamp down on ‘kick escorting’ this autumn. A ‘kick escort’ is a player who retreats downfield after the opposition has kicked, impeding chasing players and allowing their team-mate to have a better chance of catching the ball cleanly.
This has become a common sight in top-level rugby, with kick chasers often blocked from getting into the air to compete for the ball. Referees have always been looking out for obvious penalties like the one below, where Australia’s Harry Wilson clearly changes his line to block the chasing Makazole Mapimpi after a Springboks box kick. This kind of obvious change of line has always been a penalty but we had reached a situation where escorters were allowed to run back downfield, impeding kick chasers, as long as they made a beeline for where the ball was going to land and didn’t notably change their line to block the chaser.
That meant we ended up with scenarios like the one below, where New Zealand scrum-half Aaron Smith retreats towards the ball and ends up standing in front of where team-mate Richie Mo’unga catches it, impeding the chasing Kurt-Lee Arendse. World Rugby’s new directive is that this should be a penalty against Smith. We can see that Arends.