"Needs to change" - Nigel Owens and Wayne Barnes disagree over rugby's bunker system

Put simply, the bunker is an area away from crowds and other interference, which will be occupied by dedicated foul play review officials. During the World Cup, it will be at the International Broadcast Centre in Paris.

The revamped foul play review process is designed to avoid a long delay while the referee and TMO consult after an incident. 

However, even the iconic referees Nigel Owens and Wayne Barnes find themselves at odds over the divisive issue surrounding the rules of contemporary rugby.

. Barnes acknowledges that although there is room for improvement, he believes it has the potential to enhance the sport of rugby.

“I think it is at the early stages, we need to trial it more,” said Barnes.

“The bunker system needs more time to evolve, but it is the right way to improve the game.”

Owens wrote: “During the Rugby World Cup, I made no secret of my thoughts on the new TMO bunker.

While it certainly showed how it can help to speed up games, it hardly reduced controversies or improved decision-making during the tournament and, in my opinion, ended up being used too much when the decisions should have been made by the on-field referees.

“At the moment, it feels like the TMO is refereeing matches and that is not a road that rugby should be going down.

"While technology has its place in the game, how it is used currently needs to change.”

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Owens wrote: "It was hoped that they would improve player safety by reducing the number of pick-and-gos and encourage teams to spread the ball along the back line rather than bulldoze their way over to score.

But if you look at games now, teams are still picking and going and they’re still bulldozing their way over the line. If anything, it rewards negative play as the defender can just chuck themselves under the ball and hold it up."

Owens wrote: "I know it’s a cliche but how scrum-halves are feeding into the scrum is worse than ever at the moment. In the past, it wasn’t really ever straight and I was probably as guilty of letting it slide as anybody else at the time, but now it is beyond a joke. Most scrum-halves may as well put it straight under the No.8’s feet.

"Too many scrums are not being refereed at the moment .Too many refs are playing on when the scrum is down and not dealing with the issues behind it, and the problem then just continues over and over again.

"They simply need to be stronger - if they can be stronger in refereeing it and in dealing with the negative scrummagers, then we will see much more of a contest at scrum time."

Owens said: "It’s all there in the laws of the game, but it just needs to be refereed better. You can't deliberately collapse a ruck and players arriving at the ruck should be arriving on their feet and not diving off them. I'm not saying that everybody on the ground needs to be penalised, but certainly I think it's an area of the game we need to improve on.

"If we get more players on their feet contesting the ruck then we have more space in midfield for the players to attack. This will also reduce the amount of dangerous clearouts around the dead ruck areas, when piles of bodies are on the ground.

"What we saw during the World Cup was several incidents of a player coming in to jackal the ball and an opposition player coming in to try and clear him out but then just pulling him off his feet into the ground. The player is then penalised for doing nothing wrong and we’re just left with a big pile of bodies and a total mess."

Owens wrote: "One of those is tackle height. Now I don’t have an answer for it myself, but I know having spoken to people across the community game in England and Wales that the current law trial has been well received and has actually gone down better than many people expected.

" It’s certainly something that needs to be looked at in the professional game too, because at the moment it’s not in law that it’s illegal to tackle upright and players are not changing their behaviour in lowering their tackle height."

Owens said: "The boring and endless box kicks from long ruck set-ups need to be addressed too. The use it call needs to be as soon as the ball is available as in law or I would even think about reducing it to maybe three seconds."

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