I have a friend who is an economist, whose job it is to study numbers, compile data and analyse figures. He is an expert in statistics and his advice is: never trust them. They can be used to support whatever his clients wish.

There is no doubt that the International Rugby Board will have a mass of statistical evidence to prove that its brainchildren, the Experimental Law Variations, have been good for us. It will reel off ball-in-play times that will support their introduction.

This will be an exercise in saving face. We should not believe a word they say. The ELVs stink. They were designed by people with nothing but positive intentions in mind, their brief being to make the game better to play, simpler to watch and easier to referee.

They have had the opposite effect. Kicking from hand has returned to the prominence it enjoyed in the days when you could kick to touch on the full from anywhere and claim the territorial advantage. The breakdown has become a hands-on, hands-in mess. The ball may be in play for longer but it spends its time in the air or wedged at the bottom of a pile-up.

Rugby's antennae had twitched long before the ELVs were artificially imposed to sort out the perceived ills of the game circa 2003. Up-the-jumper England had been declared superannuated by the start of 2004 and extinct by the time of the Lions tour of 2005.

The All Blacks had led the counter-reformation, with running adventurous rugby, drawing the rest of the southern hemisphere along. If Argentina in the south and Italy in the north clung to the driving maul it offered variety to the diet of dazzle.

And if the World Cup of 2007 resorted to caution, with the hanging kick the chosen tactic of the tournament, perfected by the winners, South Africa, that was not so much a reflection on the trend of the age but on the nature of World Cups. That's what happens in sudden-death competition.

But no, the IRB had mobilised its reformers and there was no drawing back. Experimentation was the dogma and guinea pig students at Stellenbosh University in South Africa fed back positively. But students are not professional players. Give a pro a law and he will find a loophole. It is the way of sport. The tackle area has been shut down, when it was supposed to open up to a fair contest for the ball.

With the departure of the driving maul, a logjam of forwards has formed across the field, a string of un-exhausted donkeys, no longer required to commit to duties like scrummaging. After the wretched rhyme of crouch, pause, touch, engage, comes the peep of the whistle and the award of a free-kick. Ball in play, ball in play the statisticians purr. Ball in play, my arse.

There is one good law: the five-metre offside line at scrums. It, too, should go, simply part of the experiment that failed. Get rid of the lot of them. And the chances of that happening? Zero. That is one statistic you can believe.