Rugby chiefs insisted yesterday that referee Romain Poite had correctly overseen Italy’s unorthodox approach to the breakdown in their Six Nations clash at Twickenham as the tactic’s pioneer accused England coach Eddie Jones of being “rude”
Jones was seething as a struggling Italy, defying all pre-match predictions, led the Grand Slam champions 10-5 at half-time in a match where the Azzurri repeatedly refused to form rucks.
With this gameplan they could legitimately stray offside — a move England’s 2003 World Cup-winning coach Clive Woodward called “innovative and inspired”.
England eventually regained their composure to win 36-15 on Sunday as they extended their winning steak to 17 successive Tests.
But an angry Jones called for the rulebook to be revised and accused Poite of looking “flustered”, with the Australian adding: “I’ve never seen a referee lose his perspective of the game.”
However, a spokesman for World Rugby, the game’s global governing body, told AFP yesterday: “The match official team officiated law correctly.
“There is a formal process for unions to request law clarifications, if they wish to do so.”
Engand’s Rugby Football Union said yesterday they did not plan to utilise that procedure, with a spokeswoman explaining: “This type of issue is discussed ‘in the round’ with World Rugby, through the normal structures and meetings.
“World Rugby regularly issue clarifications on various laws so could decide to do this anyway due to the interest generated by yesterday’s match.”
As part of the standard post World Cup review into the laws of the game following the 2015 edition in England, officials were already looking into the tackle and ruck area prior to Sunday’s game.
Jones made no attempt to hide his anger at Italy’s gameplan, which he compared to underarm bowling in cricket, by saying: “If that’s rugby, I’m going to retire.”
England fly-half George Ford warned it would “kill the game quickly” if other sides followed Italy’s example as “there’s no rugby going to be played”.
Despite England’s outrage, this was not the first time the tactic had been deployed with New Zealand’s Waikato Chiefs having done something similar in Super Rugby and Australia’s David Pocock nearly creating a try against Ireland last year with the ploy.

‘Outmanoeuvred’
Ben Ryan, who as England Sevens coach pioneered the ‘no-ruck’ ploy in the abbreviated form of the game back in 2012, said he’d been stunned by Jones’s fury.
“I am flabbergasted with Eddie Jones’s reaction to it. It is called coaching, Eddie,” Ryan, who guided Fiji to Olympic Sevens gold in Rio last year, told The Times.
“He is being quite rude to people, fellow coaches who outmanoeuvred him.”
“Conor (O’Shea, the Italy coach) and Brendan (Venter, the defence coach) are working bloody hard. They don’t need a fellow coach to say their tactics are akin to underarm bowling. It is not bad sportsmanship. It is a tactic.”
He added: “It is so easy (to counter). You either make sure there is an Italian in the breakdown, so it has to be called a ruck, or you run straight through the middle, where there is a hole. Then you have the advantage against a retreating defence.”
England did this in a second half where they scored five of their six tries.
An impressed Woodward, whose England team won the World Cup against an Australia side coached by Jones, praised the Azzurri in his Daily Mail column published yesterday.
“It’s what David always has to do if he is to stand any chance against Goliath,” he said. “The tactic is entirely legitimate and it was fascinating to watch it unfold in a big-match situation.”
O’Shea had no qualms at all about his side’s approach, saying his side — thrashed 63-10 by Ireland in their previous match — “played to the law”.
“We are not going to roll over and we are going fight,” he insisted. “Just because we took people by surprise, what do they want us to do?”