“Every decision you make affects every facet of every other fucking thing. It’s too much to deal with almost. And in the end, you’re completely alone with it all.” – Tony Soprano 

When World Rugby made the seemingly minor decision in November 2024 to ensure that the chasers had full access to the player receiving the kick — also known as the “escort” law — it didn’t seem like it would fundamentally upend the game as we know it.

At the time, I felt it was a natural follow-on from the closing of the Dupont Loophole, where a player could stand in an offside position from a kick to be later put onside by the opposition passing the ball or running 5m. Essentially, if you’re offside on defensive transition, you must also crack down on those who are obstructing on offensive transition. It made sense.

Under the old interpretations, it was possible — and widely coached at almost every elite level — for the players in the initial defensive line to “drop” from their position on the line of the kick, usually a box kick, into a protective “glove” around the catcher, meaning they almost always had an uncontested take in the air with potential chasers almost always blocked off.

For a good few years, this was considered to be technically illegal but an acceptable countermeasure to some of the high-profile injuries and red cards that stemmed from the aerial contest, such as it was in the early to mid-2010s. For a good few years, there was a kind of balance here. Sure, you’d see the odd card for a high boot on the catch, or an isolated one where a chaser got too much contact on the catcher, dragging them out of the air almost, or just straight swiping the legs out from under them at speed, but the idea of a contested catch became something of an anachronism. You rarely saw it at scale.

The adjustment to the escort rule changed that immediately, but it seems to have really progressed since the off-season, when teams all around the game got a chance to sit down, identify the game for what it actually was, and then see how they could exploit it.

The first natural adjustment was to kick more frequently. I don’t think we’re fully there yet — not at club level — but it looks to be trending there.

At a basic level, if you can kick the ball from your own 10m line to just outside the opposition 22 and be guaranteed that a chaser — with four or five seconds of hang time — can contest in the air and, almost crucially in today’s game, look to bat the ball backwards while the catcher tries to… uh, catch it.

We saw that quite a bit against Bath. Look at Cokanasiga on the vast majority of these; he’s looking to own the space for a bat-back, rather than go for a more difficult catch, especially when attacking the ball from short-range.

You can see Kilgallen’s attempts in this montage that he’s not really owning that space offensively — he’s a little passive on these chases, whereas Cokanasiga is almost trying to win the aerial “collision” first, and then the bat-back.

On this one, he’s got a much shorter run to the drop, and can attempt a catch, but he’s still owning that space physically. He’s such a big human being — 6’4″ and 112kg — that he’s very difficult to engage aerially in these scenarios, especially with such a small in-goal area. The small in-goal area plus around 4.5 seconds of hang time make this a true 50/50, and Bath are very comfortable dealing with anything that ends in their favour, be it a clean take, a Bath scrum or a Munster one.

With Bath’s pitch only being 64m wide, comfortably the narrowest pitch in European rugby, and such a small in-goal area, it’s almost the perfect arena for kicking contestables. Why? Any kick from outside our 22 is going to mean a genuine 50/50 on spacing and arguably gives Bath a momentum advantage. Any drop that doesn’t go their way shows a field that is way more easily filled from a spacing perspective.

At a basic level, they kicked better than us, contested more aggressively and smarter, and, thanks to our malfunctioning lineout, were able to do so on the front foot from early in the contest.

This is arguably the second European first round with the new escort laws in play, after they were adopted ahead of the first round of the Champions Cup last season.

So are we seeing a radical change from that point? I had a look at the first round of last year’s tournament, with broadly similar matchups and weather conditions, and compared it to the weekend just gone.

From a big picture POV: both first rounds live in the same kicking universe — heavy, central to gameplan, structurally very similar — but the profile of who’s good at it shifts quite a bit, and 2025/26 looks a little more “systematised” and less wild at the extremes.

The shape of the competition hasn’t changed

Across the two opening rounds:

Kick volume is effectively identical

• 2024/25 R1: 605 kicks (25.2 per team, ~50.4 per game)
• 2025/26 R1: 599 kicks (25.0 per team, ~49.9 per game)

Kicking distance is effectively identical

• Both sit around 700 m per team, with only a tiny bump in metres per kick (c. +0.5 m per kick year-on-year).

Retention rates are effectively identical

• 2024/25 R1: ~16.5% of kicks retained
• 2025/26 R1: ~16.4% retained

In this instance, a retained kick is either a clean take from a kick your team made, a bat back that your team cleans up or a knock-on from the opposition that ends in a scrum to your team.

So if you zoom out, Round 1 of the Champions Cup looks like a settled kicking meta:

• Everyone is committed to a 25-kick, ~700 m game.
• Roughly 1.5–1.7 contestable wins per 10 kicks is the norm.
• There’s no sign of a deliberate, competition-wide move to kick less, kick more, or radically alter the balance between distance and contestability.

Whatever about law tweaks and refereeing ‘crackdowns’, the game seems to be living in a 50-kick-per-game universe. The baseline hasn’t moved.

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The distribution has changed: fewer outliers, more clustering

Where you start to see a difference is in how teams are arranged around that average.

Last season’s Round 1 had some big outliers:

• UBB at 40 kicks / 1,267 m.
• La Rochelle at 36 / 1,231 m.
• Bulls at just 12 kicks / 288 m.

This season’s Round 1 is much more compressed:

• Top volume is Bath at 38 kicks, Northampton at 32 – nobody in the mid-to-high 40s.
• The low end is Leinster at 16 kicks — nobody down at 12.
• Metres are still high, but again you get fewer “1,200 m” lunatics and more teams in the 600–900 m band.

The impression is that:

• Coaches have largely converged on the same risk/return model.
• There are fewer extreme stylistic moods in Round 1 — less “we barely kicked” vs “we kicked ourselves into the upper atmosphere.”
• Round 1 this year feels like a set of clubs all playing within the same tactical envelope, rather than a scatter-plot of wildly different philosophies.

So, if last season’s opening round felt a bit wild at the edges, this one looks like a tournament that’s agreed on what ‘normal’ kicking volume looks like, and how it should broadly be contested. This is a good sign that almost everyone has identified what the meta is, and then it just comes down to execution and personnel.

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The aerial economy has been quietly rebalanced

Even though the global retention rate doesn’t move, who is winning the aerial contest has changed quite noticeably among repeat teams.

Clear winners year-on-year

Bath

• 38 kicks, 1,075m, 8 retained → 21.1%
• 38 kicks, 1,020m, 11 retained → 28.9%
• Same volume, slightly shorter, much better yield.

Saracens

• 21 / 554m / 3 retained → 14.3%
• 25 / 667m / 8 retained → 32.0%
• More volume and more than double the retention rate.

Leinster

• 23 / 753m / 3 retained → 13.0%
• 16 / 336m / 5 retained → 31.3%
• Fewer, shorter kicks, massively more contestable value.

Bulls

• 12 / 288m / 1 retained → 8.3%
• 19 / 463m / 5 retained → 26.3%.

UBB

• 40 / 1,267m/ 8 retained → 20.0%
• 25 / 819m / 7 retained → 28.0% (lower volume, higher quality).

These sides look like they’ve tightened their contestable game:

• Better spacing.
• Better chase.
• Cleaner connection between kick choice and chase profile.

Clear “losers” year-on-year

Stormers

• 30 / 578m / 8 retained → 26.7%
• 29 / 845m / 2 retained → 6.9%

Almost the same volume, much longer kicks and their contestable value falls off a cliff, although it didn’t impact their result against a rotated Bayonne.

Toulon

• 36 / 1,038m / 6 retained → 16.7%
• 24 / 883m / 0 retained → 0%.

Castres

• 39 / 961m / 8 retained → 20.5%
• 24 / 883m / 0 retained → 0%.

Bristol

• 14 / 414 / 3 retained → 21.4%
• 26 / 777 / 0 retained → 0%.

These teams are still kicking into roughly the same global environment, but:

• Either they’ve drifted into longer, more passive distance trades, or
• Their escort/chase coordination has slipped relative to everyone else.

The overall kicking load hasn’t changed, but the aerial market has been re-priced. Some clubs are getting a lot more for every kick; others are getting almost nothing.

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Two clear strategic archetypes emerge

If you categorise the Round 1 profiles, you see two big camps.

1) Territorial boot with built-in contestables

Teams like:

• Bath, Saracens, UBB, Bulls, Leinster (this season), Edinburgh, Gloucester, Quins (last season), Northampton.

Common features:

• Moderate-to-high volume (around 25–35 kicks).
• 600–900 m of distance – not ultra-short, not purely long.
• Retention in the high teens to low 30s – they reliably get 2–3 wins back per 10 kicks.

For these sides, the kick is very clearly an attacking platform, not just a means of getting out of trouble.

2) Distance traders with low contestable payoff

Teams like:

• Stormers (this season), Toulon and Castres (this season), Bristol (this season), and La Rochelle of last season.

Common features:

• Kicks averaging 30 m+, often pushing them towards the 800–1,000 m mark.
• Retention rates are collapsing into single digits or zero.
• The bet is: “We’ll win in transition defence, set-piece and errors, not on getting the ball back from our own kicks.”

Round 1 across the two seasons shows both models coexisting under essentially the same law and refereeing framework. The law environment isn’t picking a winner; the execution is.

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Munster’s Round 1 in that context

Munster’s two Round 1s fit that picture neatly:

2024/25 vs Stade Français

• 27 kicks, 721 m, 7 retained → 25.9%.
• That’s classic “territorial boot with contestables” – medium volume, decent distance, strong return.

2025/26 vs Bath

• 26 kicks, 635 m, 5 retained → 19.2%.
• Volume is very similar, distance slightly down, retention down.
• At the same time, Bath’s return jumps from 21.1% to 28.9%.

So, in a single Round 1 snapshot:

• Munster haven’t changed their headline kicking profile much.
• What has changed is that:
  • Our own aerial yield dips a little.
  • Our opponent’s aerial yield spikes.

In other words, in this year’s Round 1, Munster are still operating in the same tactical territory, but Bath win the aerial margins more decisively than Stade did the year before.

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So I started to think, how can we quantify an aerial battle? I’ve done it with Linebreaks Per Ruck, so does it track with the kicking game?

I came up with this: Aerial Contest Equity.

ACE measures how many more (or fewer) kicks you win back than your opponent, per 10 kicks.

In formula form:

• Contestable Return Rate (CRR) = kicks retained ÷ total kicks
• ACE = 10 × (your CRR − their CRR)

So:

• ACE > 0 → you’re winning the aerial battle.
• ACE < 0 → they’re winning it.
• ACE ≈ 0 → broadly even in the air.

With that, let’s compare Munster and Bath’s Round 1 game from last year, and compare it to this year’s Round 1 game between the same two sides.

Bath vs La Rochelle (2024/25 Round 1)

Bath

• Kicks: 38
• Retained: 8 → CRR = 8/38 ≈ 21.1%

La Rochelle

• Kicks: 36
• Retained: 1 → CRR = 1/36 ≈ 2.8%

Interpretation:

• Bath are getting about 1.8 extra contestable wins per 10 kicks compared to La Rochelle.
• Net retained kicks: Bath +7 (8–1).
• That’s a decisive aerial win for Bath, albeit they lost that game to La Rochelle because the set-piece battle and La Rochelle’s size advantage played better on the narrow pitch.

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2. Munster vs Stade Français (2024/25 Round 1)

Munster

• Kicks: 27
• Retained: 7 → CRR ≈ 25.9%

Stade Français

• Kicks: 16
• Retained: 2 → CRR = 12.5%

Interpretation:

• Munster won about 1.3 extra contestables per 10 kicks versus Stade.
• Net retained kicks: Munster +5 (7–2).
• That’s a clear but not ridiculous aerial win — comfortably ahead in the air.

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Bath vs Munster (2025/26 Round 1)

Bath

• Kicks: 38
• Retained: 11 → CRR ≈ 28.9%

Munster

• Kicks: 26
• Retained: 5 → CRR ≈ 19.2%

Interpretation:

• Bath won about one extra contestable per 10 kicks compared with Munster.
• Net retained: Bath +6 (11–5).
• Again, Bath “win the aerial battle,” but by a slightly smaller margin than they had over La Rochelle the previous season.

From Munster’s angle:

• Round 1 last year: +1.3 ACE vs Stade.
• Round 1 this year: −1.0 ACE vs Bath (because if Bath are +1.0, Munster are −1.0).

We went from comfortably ahead in the aerial contest one year to clearly behind the next, with similar kick volumes. This is what we’d expect to happen, though; Bath are very much a kick-dominant team, at home, in weather conditions that perfectly suit a kicking battle like this.

Now — what about Steve Borthwick?

Earlier this year, the England head coach Steve Borthwick was widely accredited with a metric that went broadly like this: for every kick you regain, you have a 5% increased chance of winning a test match.

I don’t see a different competition so much as a more refined one. The first round is still living in the same 50-kick universe it was last year — roughly 25 kicks and just over 700 kicking metres per team — so the headline volume hasn’t really changed year on year. The law was the same this time last year, so that scans.

I think the big shift is in the spread, not the average. Last season’s Round 1 had wild outliers on both ends of the scale; this year, the kicking profiles are much more tightly clustered. Teams look like they’ve quietly agreed on what “normal” kicking volume is and are now arguing about execution, not the philosophy itself.

I would say the aerial market has been re-priced rather than reinvented. The overall retention rate across the round is basically identical, but the identity of the winners and losers has changed. Sides like Bath, Saracens, Leinster, the Bulls and UBB are getting far more value per kick, while others are kicking just as often but getting almost nothing back. This can come back to everything from key personnel being missing to the weather suiting one side’s characteristics, to just flat out having an off-day.

I don’t see a law-driven explosion in kicking so much as a skill race encouraged by the law tweak. Within the same volume, the teams that have organised best around their chase, spacing and contestables are pulling away; the teams that are still defaulting to long, passive distance trades are effectively handing the ball back every time they kick. Is this the death of long-range counter-transition rugby? It just might be.

I’d describe this Round 1 just gone as being settled in shape but volatile in margins. Everyone is playing roughly the same territorial game; the difference now is how efficiently you can turn those 25 or so kicks into actual possession, field position and pressure. This is where your lineout and scrum now become way more important as force multipliers to the kicking game.

Munster’s kicking profile from Round 1 last year to this year hasn’t really moved, but Bath’s year-on-year improvement in aerial return shows how punishing the margins can be when the opposition is more efficient at turning the same kicking load into ball back.

That showcases how important guys like Calvin Nash are, and how punishing an off-day against a good kicking team can be on a bad night, especially with other key metrics going downhill at key points.