The assist is a recorded statistic in several sports - football, ice hockey, baseball and basketball. The assist is a way of showing that a player may not score a lot of the time, but always do their best to try and help their team win.

I think it should come in to rugby.

I mean, think about it. There are so many times when a player will stitch up the defence, then offload or pass to that final guy who gets the try. While he'll be happy just to get some points on the board, the guy who made the try doesn't actually get any recognition barring a drink at the pub later in the evening, if he's lucky.

Yet there are players who excel at finding the open man in broken play, or slicing through the line to set up others. Conrad Smith barely ever gets tries, but think how many times he's set up Ma'a Nonu, Cory Jane, Hosea Gear, David Smith and Tamati Ellison. How often does Dan Carter scythe through the opposition to hand the ball off to a rampaging forward?

In many instances in broken play, all the player has had to do is catch the ball and fall over, while the player who set up the try may have eluded or broken multiple tackles and for this he gets no recognition.

Introducing the assist wouldn't be hard, though I think that the basketball model should be adjusted to rugby - the football version wouldn't work because it's so easy to win a penalty in rugby and often it has nothing to do with the work of the ball carrier, and the NHL model would be impossible to explain to audiences.

Thoughts?