The maul is making a comeback in rugby union — and the Springboks have driven the change.
On June 1, 2026, World Rugby will roll out a law application guideline aimed at rebuilding the integrity of the rolling maul, an area pundits and coaches have argued was being quietly dismantled by defending teams. Eggchasers Rugby has labelled the move long overdue, framing it as one of the most significant tweaks of the season and crediting South Africa's coaching brains trust with forcing the conversation.
The clarification does not rewrite the law book. It instead reminds referees to enforce a clause that has, in recent seasons, been allowed to lapse. World Rugby has confirmed it published the new guidance because the maul has 'become increasingly difficult to referee, hard to manage, and challenging to explain to viewers and fans', and to deal with players who deliberately end up 'on the wrong side' of the maul to disrupt it.
That bureaucratic language masks a fairly transparent ploy. For two seasons, defending packs have been crossing in front of an attacking maul, splitting it from the side, or pulling at jerseys to collapse it. The relevant law forbidding the dragging and pulling of opponents has always been black-letter, but enforcement quietly drifted.
Eggchasers traces the lineage back to a Springbok-produced YouTube series, 'The Shape of the Game', released a month before World Rugby's late-February shape-of-the-game conference. In that series, Rassie Erasmus and his defence coach Felix Jones laid out exactly the area they wanted addressed.
'There's a route in World Rugby that you can send a law clarification request and World Rugby take it to their law committee,' Erasmus explained in the series. 'They come back and they circulate that and they say this is a law clarification. We just submitted one recently around the words drag and pull and what does that mean? Because it's included in the laws around the maul and the ruck. What does it mean to drag and pull on a ruck or a maul?'
Erasmus reduced the issue to a single rhetorical question: 'What part of the game is it where you are pulling against opposition?'
Jones, the former Munster fullback turned defence specialist who served two seasons as an England assistant before rejoining the Springbok set-up, was equally direct in the same series. 'When that situation happens where people end up on the side and we think they're pulling or dragging or whatever it is, I think for the spectator it becomes really difficult to see what's going on here,' he said.
Walking through frozen frames, Jones invited viewers to draw their own conclusion. 'These red players are in that exact same position. What words must I use to describe these players? They're not pushing? Certainly not.'
The Eggchasers host argues the clips World Rugby has used to illustrate its new guidance are, suspiciously, drawn from the same examples Jones prepared. 'Coincidence? Nah, I don't think so.'
Beyond the political theatre, the practical impact is what excites the analyst. Strong mauls, the argument runs, do not slow the game — they create space elsewhere by pinning up to 16 players in a tight zone, freeing the wider channels for the highlight-reel offloads modern audiences want. Eggchasers also points out the scrum is being called less often than at any point in living memory, leaving the maul as the last reliable showcase of rugby union's unique selling point — a set-piece for all shapes and sizes.
The change will be in force for the start of the Nations Championship in July. England, whose maul has been one of their few reliable weapons under Steve Borthwick, should benefit. So, naturally, will the Springboks.
