Kicking on

BOX-KICKING boredom. Tedious kick-fest. Endless kick-tennis killing the game.

All of these expressions were used to describe the rugby on show during the Autumn Nations Cup last year. Words like ‘turgid’, ‘ponderous’ and ‘aimless’ were also thrown around – perhaps more often than the ball in some Tests – with the prevalence of kicking unappealing to many viewers.

Eddie Jones has described critics of England’s current style as “disrespectful” while saying rugby is going through a defensive cycle. Yet there have been entertaining spectacles at club level that would disprove this assertion. Take the 11-try encounter between Bath and Wasps or Clermont’s 51-38 win at Bristol.

People might point to those matches as anomalies but in women’s rugby as a whole it would certainly be rare to see a long sequence of kicks back and forth, as there is generally a far better balance between the kick-pass-run options.

This hasn’t always been the case; in the early