How knock-outs are won
There follow the two semifinals, the 3rd/4th play-off and the Final.
It is an exciting time, glee for winners but disappointment for losers who then trudge home in gloom wondering what might have been.
Each one of the knock-out matches requires a winner. The simplest way to do it is to score more points than your opponents in the 80 playing minutes. But if at the end of the 80 minutes the scores are tied. What the is the mechanism to determine a winner?
1. The first resort is extra time, as happened in the finals of 1995 and 2003.
At the end of the drawn 80 minutes, there is a break of five minutes and then two halves of 10 minutes each with a five-minute half-time.
The extra time is treated as a new match with a new toss with a decision for the winner of direction or kick-off.
2. If there is still a drawn ending to extra-time, there is a period in which the winner is determined by sudden death. In sudden death the team that scores first wins. The duration of sudden death is made up of two halves of 10 minutes each.
3. If neither team scores in this period then, sadly, the winner is decided by a kicking competition, when the team game ceases and rugby becomes an individual sport.
The kicking competition is by place-kicking at one end of the field – the one end is to make life easier for photographers and broadcasters.
a. The captains will toss and the winner will choose which team kicks first.
b. The players available to kick will be those who were playing at the end of the sudden death.
c. Each team will have five kickers and the referee will control the order in which they kick.
d. Only the referee, his two assistants and two ball boys are allowed in the half where the 10 kickers are. The use of a TMO is available.
e. The kicks will all be along the 22-metre line with all the kickers kicking at each station – directly in front of the posts, on the 15-metre line to the left of the posts from the kickers' viewpoint and on the 15-metre line on the right.
f. The kickers from each team will take turns, team about. After the first two players have kicked at a station, the next two will move on to the next station till all five players from each team have kicked.
g. If at the end of this rigamarole the scores are still tied a sudden-death kicking competition takes place with the same 10 kickers in the same order.
The sudden death will carry on till somebody misses.
