What do you think to this as an idea for a rule change?

If you drop the ball from either a kick or a pass, or the ball is spilled when being tackled it's considered a knock on and a scrum is awarded to the opposition.

It allows us to get rid of this "did it go forwards or backwards" garbage.

Perfect. You saw it here first. I've impressed even myself with this one

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The rule as it is now is right just not applied properley,the ball souldl knocked towards the oponents goal line from the hand or arm. droping the ball vertially to the floor or getting your foot to it before the grond is not! all of wich I have seen given as knock on recently.

Don't like that myself, basically it is saying that in any situation where the ball touches the floor after a player touches it it is a knock on, that's seems far to restrictive. Getting towards American football territory with that where the play finishes after the ball touches the floor and the reset the line of scrimmage. We'd be doing the same and having a scrum almost every time. It means that even if it is really clear that it goes backwards it will still be a penalty, no thanks.

The amount of times the game will be stopped would be frustrating.
The game is becoming slower as it is.

I agree with the above. The game would become much slower.

I think we need to get rid of scrums - If there's a knock on. Tap or PTB (not quick) to the opposition and away we go.
Make the game much quicker.

Am I alone in thinking kicks take forever - penalties & conversions? Even kicking from the hand is not what it was. I'd get rid of kicking too. And long passes - where the ball is in the air for an age - that twists my melon.

Some players control the ball by knocking it back, that's a skill

What about when its going near touch for a 40-20 and they flick it back in field then run after the ball and pick it up

Some of the great recent tries have been players diving over the dead ball line flicking the ball back for a mate to score

I'm very much the opposite. I'd have competitive scrums. Introduce another aspect to play that's available to teams to use if they want to.

If knock-ons were all deemed to be a penalty, brilliant pieces of skill such as that displayed at the weekend by Taulima Tautai, to pinch the win for Wigan, would be gone from the game - and who would want that?

Might be wrong and someone can correct me if I am but I seem to think that there is nothing saying that teams cant shunt and push and compete at a scrum, I seem to remember a couple of instances last season where teams did so. I'm assuming they don't because when you watch a game of union and they reset every scrum five times before getting it right even though they have performed the act thousands of times it really breaks the game up and the stoppages would really mount up.

Cas won the scrum against the head a few times last season. Most notable would be when they forced Roby to knock on at the base of the scrum and they went down the other end for Roberts game winning drop goal.

So scrums can still be competitive, choosing when to do it is a skill in itself.

I think the scrums can be competitive, with a few recent examples such as the cas one above, and I recall, Tomkins scoring for the warriors after they pushed the opposition off the ball.

It seems part of the problem is the refs don't seem to have a clue what to do if a team pushes or tries to stike, they just reset the scrum.

Scrums aren't competitive because coaches want their players to break asap.

There is nothing in the rules to make them non-contested.

At best, refs could ensure the LF binds and stays in.

The feed of the ball into the scrum makes it very difficult to win a scrum. Just change the rule back to the ball having to go in the middle of the scrum.

You mean apply the rule that still stands? We would then find out how good Roby or the rest of the number 9s are. I am all for competative scrums as long as we don't get back to the farce it had become, or the endless bore fest that the other codes scrums are. An even contest makes 40/20 kicks into touch a riskier option but also stops in touch as a safe option to wind down the clock.

I agree, I don't want it like the Union lot either but I think it could add a dimension to the game that would help. I also don't think it would end up like Union because all the other demands of RL still apply and mean you simply can't get away with the 20 stone monsters that are used as props in Union.
I also think that, as a sport, we can come up with rules and apply them so that it's no messier than it has to be.

Maybe for 40-20's we could give the kicking team a tap restart rather than a scrum so that the benefit of a 40-20 still applies?

You don't even have to have modern hookers in the hooking position in the scrum if you don't want. They obviously have a huge role in modern RL as being the acting half so if clubs didn't want to burden their acting halves with having hooking duties too I'm sure they could adapt a second rower (or whoever they wanted) to that role.

My main reason for thinking this would be a good thing is that I think we have a problem with our game in terms of keeping teams in a game. The nature of RL is unique (I think) in sport in that a team can be dominated more easily than in other sports and it can be incredibly difficult to overturn that dominance. That dominance then often leads to big score lines. RL also has relatively few "battlegrounds" as I call them. We have some like an offloading game for instance but obviously the main area by a distance is the play the ball. If you lose that battle you're probably going to lose the game. And if you can't really compete in that area you'll lose by 40 odd points. Whereas Union for instances has several areas to compete in. Of course the ruck/maul is important in Union but if you're not particularly strong in one area in Union you can focus on another such as scrums or lineouts.
So basically I think it would hugely benefit the game (especially the international game) if we introduced another area where a team could compete. France, for instance, could then maybe focus on a big pack that could win some scrums against the head combined with a good kick to touch game to get them out of trouble when playing England who will probably be faster at and control the play the ball.