Rugby Union: League players are welcomed to the club: International Board opens its door a fraction to the professional code and tinkers with experimental laws

RUGBY UNION yesterday unlocked the door between it and professional rugby league, but though in theory the likes of Ellery Hanley and Mal Meninga could one day become 15-a-side rather than 13-a-side players, the door is no more than slightly ajar.

There will, emphatically, be no way back into union for those who abandoned their first sporting love for the league shilling - even though two exceptions, the Australians Tony Melrose and Mitchell Cox, were readmitted after their case had gone as far as their country's Supreme Court.

But the International Rugby Football Board, whose executive council has been holding its annual general meeting all week in Edinburgh, is to adopt a different posture with those who have never previously had anything to do with union. We should not expect a flood of defections.

'We had two problems,' the IRFB's amateurism committee chairman, Denis Easby, said. 'Firstly, there was the rugby union man who had gone to rugby league - who had joined the club and broke the rules. Secondly, there was the rugby league man who had never joined the club. We decided there should be a difference between the two, that the rugby league man should be dealt with less stringently.' This is exactly the sort of 'clubby' language that tends to turn league men off union, but anyway Hanley and others may be pleased to know that, even though they have been handsomely remunerated, they will be eligible to play rugby union after a two-year gap. For under-19s, the decent interval is one year. For Jonathan Davies or Martin Offiah, it remains perpetuity.

The board's move was motivated mainly by Australia, where there are vast areas of the country where the only available sport is rugby league. As for Cox and Melrose, they had the legal exploitation of loose wording of the IRFB regulations to thank for their reinstatement; the wording has now been tightened up.

The ruck-and-maul laws which have caused controversy during their experimental year have not yet been ratified but will continue, with amendments mainly suggested by international coaches who met recently in Hong Kong, as an experiment for a further year. This means that the put- in at a scrummage following a maul will continue to go against the side who created the maul, irrespective of who is going forward.

From next season, however, the side going forward will receive the put-in if the referee cannot determine who started the maul; if a player catches the ball direct from a kick and a maul immediately forms, his team will have the put-in if a scrum ensues; and players must now join a ruck or maul behind the hindmost foot of the hindmost player rather than the line of the ball.

'It was agreed that coaches have a great responsibility to adopt a positive approach to playing the game within these laws and must instil the same attitude in their players,' Roger Vanderfield, IRFB laws chairman, said. The amendments are immediately applicable in the southern hemisphere, but whether the Lions and All Blacks will be bound by them during their forthcoming series has yet to be resolved.

The World Cup will continue to be at four-year intervals after 1995, the board decided, but seedings will be restricted to the finalists and third-placed country from the previous tournament plus the host country if there is only one. The future of the World Cup Sevens, inaugurated at Murrayfield last weekend, will be determined at the IRFB interim meeting in the spring.

Qualification regulations have been tightened so that those who represent national second teams (England A / B, Emerging Wallabies, etc) are deemed to have made a definitive choice of country, though the residential stipulation is down from four years to three. Thus if Rupert Moon were to play for England B now, he could not, as he has, go on to become the senior Wales scrum-half.