We need to grasp the idea of using a smaller ball in women’s rugby
With the 2021 Rugby World Cup final playing out to a record attendance of 42,579 at Eden Park, and the Allianz Premier 15s in full swing, never before has women’s rugby been so popular.
There are ideas about how to further increase its popularity, and a common debate is whether or not women’s rugby should use a smaller ball to compensate for smaller hand and body sizes, making for a faster-paced game. It could be a way to boost support for the women’s game even further.
In national and club games, the increase in skill and development of women’s rugby is incredibly impressive, especially considering how little funding women’s rugby has historically received.
This is all with the same size five rugby ball that we see in the men’s game. Proportionally, the men’s game does seem to have better quality kicking, handling, and ball security in contact when using the standard size five ball.
World Rugby trialled a size 4.5 ball at elite level a few years ago, but with tournaments interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, nothing ever came of it.
In an October episode of The Real Science of Sport podcast, sports scientist Professor Ross Tucker was joined by rugby journalist Jess Hayden to discuss this trial and the overall debate.
Tucker said: “I’m not sure what the appetite to go back to it is, but at the time that the trial was proposed, there was a discussion amongst delegates around the world. Fifty per cent did not want this trial to take place, and their perception was ‘it’s rugby’ – we use the same equipment and rules.
“The other fifty per cent were saying ‘no, we can improve the spectacle’ by having a smaller ball.”
Tucker added that the early data from that trial saw a drastic improvement in kicking, and it meant that players could kick the ball further for touch with a five- to ten-metre improvement on the larger ball.
Hayden believed that her opinion on ball sizing had changed, and before, she was very much in the camp of ‘women should play with the same size ball as men’.
She said: “In this World Cup, we’ve seen a lot of knock-ons, which means more scrum time, and I don’t believe that it’s very entertaining for fans to watch scrum after scrum. I think a lot of that happens from not being able to hang on to the ball and grip it in one hand.
“I have definitely moved on from being completely against it, to thinking ‘I don’t think that it hurts to trial this.’ I don’t think that the game will be less respected if the ball is smaller.”
She suggested that a trial run could even reduce the number of injuries that come from scrummages.
Tucker added: “The overwhelming proportion of lineouts with a bigger ball were going to the front, while the smaller ball would go to the back more often, getting the ball off the top at the back and a potentially open game off the line… The speed of the pass would be better. The ability to offload the pass and find line breaks as a consequence would improve.”
In February 2020, Irish referee JP Doyle suggested that a smaller size four ball would be easier to handle and allow for more exciting individual tries.
Interestingly, Doyle argued that many other sports have adapted their ball sizes for women such as American football and basketball, which has increased the pace of the game.
He said: “If you look across all sports, they all adjust for different ways of playing.
“A good example is NFL to college football. Many people won’t know that it is a same-sized ball but it is shaped in a different way.”
In May 2022, Ireland Six Nations back Eimear Considine told RTE Sport’s podcast “I actually don’t know the reasons why we use a size five ball but it’s worth a discussion. My hands aren’t big enough to do a one-handed offload but maybe if there was a smaller ball it might allow for you to be a bit slicker.
“Naturally, we have smaller hands, that’s just our physiology, it’s nothing to do with not being able to play with a size five ball. It’s more our skills might improve if we had a smaller ball. That’s a really interesting argument, the fact that a lot of other sports around the world do use a size four ball.”
The differences with the men’s game comes down to distances – men can kick it further, and throw it further, on the same size pitch. Perhaps as professionalism in women’s rugby changes, there may not be a need for this debate in the future.
But as it stands, we can’t expect amateur athletes, who have to hold down other jobs, to have the same skill level as professionals who can dedicate all their time to improving their performance.
There is no harm in at least trying a size-four ball at this stage of the game. Besides the fact that rugby clubs with both men’s and women’s sides would need to purchase twice as many balls, it could increase the speed of play, the quality of the ball handling, as well as the kicking distance and accuracy.
This would make the sport even more exciting entertainment for both supporters and players.
