Rugby Union / Five Nations Focus: New laws ignore lore of the spectacle: Tries and excitement are fast disappearing from the championship. Steve Bale reports

THE EVIDENCE, statistical and of our own eyes, is stark: the Five Nations' Championship is not what it used to be only last season. At the acme of the European game, tries have dried up and excitement has been reduced to bite-sized chunks.

Dare we hope that when England and Scotland meet on Saturday at Twickenham, or perhaps Wales and Ireland at Cardiff Arms Park, an entire wholesome meal will be laid before the Royals who now turn up at these occasions as inevitably as ticket touts? ( pounds 850 a pair is the going rate for the Calcutta Cup.)

Probably not. The England- Scotland match as often as not produced indigestible rugby even before the deleterious rule changes which have robbed big- time rugby of its spectacle. In fact given that the focus will be on Twickenham, perhaps Wales v Ireland will stand a better chance, particularly after Neil Jenkins's weekend outburst.

Having survived the calls for his head, the Wales outside-half promised: 'I'm going to show what I can do. We're going to run the ball.' Hooray. In this of all seasons that is big talk, not simply because of Welsh difficulties in getting the ball but because when they then try (unsuccessfully) to use it they are confronted by blanket defences consisting of forwards who no longer have to commit themselves to the grunt and grapple of rucks and mauls.

It is the same for everyone and one good reason why the total of tries after six of the 10 championship matches is a paltry 10 compared with 22 at the same stage last season and 34 in all. All right, so England were running everyone ragged this time last year but, if the new laws have had nothing to do with the reduction, it is a remarkable coincidence.

Tries have not been as hard to score since the 1962 and '63 Five Nations produced just 16 each. The lowest since the war was 12 in 1959. To make matters worse, most of this season's have been prosaic in the extreme: five from varieties of kick-and-chase and one from a forward flop-over.

Only Scotland and France have created tries by constructive back play. England, who scored 15 in last season's four Grand Slam matches, have amassed one - and that from a fluky penalty rebound off a post - in two.

There are individual causes for the deterioration, not least both England's and Scotland's failure to achieve the tries against Wales a proliferation of opportunities warranted. Ireland are too bad to have scored even one; France have no pace behind the scrum; Wales have lost their creativity.

But always in this season of experimentation it has come come down to who has adapted better to the new laws - which attackers have realised and acted on the absolute necessity of clearing the ball quickly from the point of contact and which defenders have been most successful in wrapping up the ball-carrier in octopus arms.

Wales did the latter against England and won, Scotland did the former against Wales and won, and there were moments of exhilaration in both games. But instead of being based on positive thinking international rugby, in these islands anyway, is governed by fear - the fear of conceding the scrummage put-in when the ball becomes locked into a ruck or maul, whether or not you are the ones moving forward.

This, it seems to me, is so fundamentally negative that it cannot be justified and certainly not outweighed by those who say misuse of the ball should always warrant the punishment of turning it over. The trouble with this, for the impassioned watcher anyway, is that rugby no longer has crescendos, only staccato notes.

According to research conducted by the Rugby Football Union, the higher up the game you go the less players and coaches like the changes - and the more, therefore, they would like rucks and mauls to be restored to previous normality by the International Board's annual meeting in Edinburgh in April. In the Courage League there has been a significant decrease in tries and a corresponding increase in penalty goals.

In Wales the perception is less captious, the Heineken League having produced more exciting and higher-scoring rugby than in England. Indeed Alan Davies, the Wales coach, is perfectly content but it is fair to point out - as Bob Dwyer, the estimable coach of Australia, constantly has - that the gap between the better and the worse teams has been deliberately narrowed. This is ethically dubious, to say the least.

On the other hand, although the Scots have adapted more readily than others, even Ian McGeechan, their master coach, is not yet convinced that they are for the good of the game. 'I'm happy with the way we are playing it,' he said, which is not the same thing.

'It's taken a bit of thought but any changes in the law do. I didn't want to say too much until we had been through the championship and seen it evolve to see what effect it has on the game in general.'

The joke is that when the Australians (though emphatically not Dwyer) promoted the changes they were specifically designed to boost spectator, rather than player, interest and so continue rugby union's elevation into the world league of sport. But however high the profile, it has done nothing of the sort.

Instead it has exacerbated the 'professional' demands made on players in this great 'amateur' game of ours and led coaches into ambiguity about what is for the best. For instance, Dick Best, the England coach, was recently inveighing against the laws when in the autumn he was expressing approval.

At the same time, his analysis of the real implications remains the best I have seen. 'It would probably be a backward step to go back to the old power play. But what they have to understand is that by making the game quicker, especially in the shop window, you have to be fitter.

'And if you are constantly asking people to be fitter and fitter it's going to take more and more of their social time. The consequence of that is inevitable, but that's the way it's shaping up. The law-makers have to be aware of where they are pushing people.'

Which basically means it is not like the old days, though in the context of this Five Nations season the old days were less than a year ago. Four games remain - Ireland v England and France v Wales bring down the championship curtain on 20 March - in which to prove wrong an army of doubters.

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