New Season; New Laws

With the kickoff to the 2013 FRQ 15’s season just over a month away, time to brush up on some of the new laws that you’ll be dealing with in 2013.

The South African refs released a good video with Mark Lawrence, going through the new laws. There video is posted here on YouTube and please note; only the “senior variation” of the scrum laws will apply to us (starting at 2:18 of the video)… the “junior variations” are internal to South Africa.

I wrote a more detailed summary of the law changes back in December, which you can find here.

A quick summary, for those who don’t like videos or longer articles:

Scrums: Engagement sequence  is now “Crouch – Touch – Set”.

Rucks: Once the ball arrives at the back foot, the ref can say “Use it”, and the 9 will have 5 seconds to move it… otherwise, a turnover scrum is awarded (similar to the maul rules).

Quick Lineout: Throw in can occur ANYWHERE between the lineout mark and the thrower’s goal-line. If Red kicks it out and the Blue lineout is on the Red 22, Blue can go quickly, as far back as they want.

Infringements at Lineout: Before, if you got a penalty or free kick in a lineout, your options were to take the FK or PEN at the 15m line, or opt for a scrum. Now, you can ALSO choose to have a lineout.

Conversions: You now only have 90 seconds to take the kick, starting from the moment the ball is grounded for the try. So if you spent 80 seconds looking for the tee, you better kick it in 10 seconds, or the kick is nullified.

Turnout at training last night (April 2nd) was good, but we need EVERYONE to show up and get working. Season kicks off on May 13th… about 5 weeks away!

See you next Tuesday!