No sport has a more torturous relationship with its law book than rugby union. Mainly because those laws keep mutating, sprouting new clauses and subclauses like a wordy virus. In 2018 matters had reached such a point of impenetrability that World Rugby rewrote the entire book, its plodding 160 pages reduced by 42%.
Since 2018, of course, that slimline version has continued mutating, and last week World Rugby updated it again. Some of it was changing terminology: it is now officially the try line, not the goal line; a knock-on is a knock forward; and a word that never existed in the real world anyway, the jackler, is henceforth to be known as the stealer. But, of the material changes made on the pitch, some still being trialled, what can we say after three rounds of the Six Nations?
