Rugby league is a game that changes with the times. This is what makes our game great. Rugby league has for a long time tried to make the game faster, and because of this, have disposed of the contested scrum.
But maybe it’s time to reclaim it.
The scrum is the only spectacle rugby union has over our great game.
No matter what code you support, the scrum is one of the most beautiful and fearsome battles in the game. And rugby league used to have this battle.
But the league scrum today is dismal at best and it has been touted that the scrum should be scrapped from the game due to its uselessness.
The rugby league scrum (or the “lean on”, as our union brothers taunt) needs to be reintroduced and the rules need to be looked at. The league scrum is still very close to the union scrum in law, just not in practice.
The law of rugby league allows for uncontested scrums, but there are still laws allowing for them to be contested.
First of all, it is interesting to know that when the scrum is locked in, both teams are allowed to push-even before the ball has been fed.
Also, the ball must be fed straight through the legs of the front rowers of the opposing teams (the law states that only the hooker can rake for the ball. After they have come in contact with the ball, all players are able to play at it).
All this seems to state that the scrum is allowed to be contested, and that the referees could penalise a lot of teams for not feeding the ball correctly.
The scrum would take a lot out of the forwards and allow the backs to show off some of their brilliant footwork and speed to score tries.
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December 3rd 2009 @ 7:47am
jus de couchon said | December 3rd 2009 @ 7:47am | Report comment
Yep . Too much time in Rugby is wasted in resetting scrums. Breakdowns usualy lead to a penalty. League players run into eachother Ad Nauseum. Rugby play Aerial ping pong . Still better than soccer though.
December 3rd 2009 @ 8:02am
LT80 said | December 3rd 2009 @ 8:02am | Report comment
I agree with the general idea that it would be good to see more of a contest at the scrum.
But one problem would be that if they were fully contested similar to rugby, front rowers would have to be scrum specialists and would probably need to be heavier than they are now.
I think it would be good if the halfbacks were made to feed the call in straight(er), and the pack could push if they wanted to, so we might see the occassional win against the head.
December 3rd 2009 @ 8:21am
jus de couchon said | December 3rd 2009 @ 8:21am | Report comment
In Rugby , half Backs dont feed the ball in straight anymore. Like League it may decsend into another uncontested restart.
December 3rd 2009 @ 8:45am
M1tch said | December 3rd 2009 @ 8:45am | Report comment
Lets scrap scrums all together and replace with a play the ball, watch rugby and league people quickly realise how much better we are without them..
HOLD, TOUCH, ENGAGE!
ok..lets move the mark over here..HEY wheres the ball, give it to the scrum half.
okay lads, HOLD, TOUCH, ENGAGE..no you there you collapsed the scrum..PENALTY
December 3rd 2009 @ 9:26am
LT80 said | December 3rd 2009 @ 9:26am | Report comment
Rugby union scrums are a great part of the game when they work well. Unfortunately at the test level, there is so much collapsing and resetting that they can be a blight on the match. For some reason it seems like you don’t see this as much at the lower levels though.
December 3rd 2009 @ 9:56am
mitzter said | December 3rd 2009 @ 9:56am | Report comment
Absolutely! in lower grades you hardly ever see a collapsed scrum in union. It’s all the cheating professional players! In terms of league I don’t understand why they don’t contest more often. If you give a scrum away on your 10 meter line are you really going to be afraid of giving a penalty away when you could get the ball. I would think it would be easier than defending for 6 and maybe getting a try scored against you or a dropout
December 3rd 2009 @ 10:47am
Springs said | December 3rd 2009 @ 10:47am | Report comment
Scrums are needed for a break in play
December 3rd 2009 @ 9:24am
Farmer said | December 3rd 2009 @ 9:24am | Report comment
RL do not want real scrums because over the years they have systematically removed all opportunities or contests for the ball. No real scrums, no stripping or changing of possession in the tackle ( apart from a 1 on 1 situation) , no rucking in the play the ball, no gang tackles.
All contest for the ball is removed and for the sake of simplifiying and speeding up the game, I think we are left with a very bland game.
Lean-to scrums, 4 hit ups (settlers) , 1 atempt to run the ball and a kick on the 6th tackle. then it starts all over again. I know that followers of RL are passionate about the game, but it is a little vanilla for my liking. Only a mistake (dropped or lost ball) will result in the 6 tackle routine being interrupted. No real contest, not a lot of technicality and all aimed at removing the contest, removing the areas for transgression – No grapple tackles, no chicken wing tackles etc etc.
What this results in is that all players are interchangeable, no special skills for special positions.
RL will not re-introduce real scrums. It goes against everything that has been done each year to address the latest drama that develops in how teams play.
December 3rd 2009 @ 11:57am
macavity said | December 3rd 2009 @ 11:57am | Report comment
This myth about the lack of “contest for the ball” in RL is exactly that – a myth.
Forced errors (particularly from a big hit) are a huge momentum swinger, and forcing errors a valuable skill.
Every hit up, every tackle, is a contest for the ball in some shape. Players have been coached to protect posession so actual turnovers are less frequent than in the past, but that doesn’t eliminate the contest.
In addition to the contest for the ball, the contest for every metre is as fierce as you can get, the contest for field position a tactical game within a game, and the contest in the tackle often the difference between a win and a loss that only real RL trainspotters can ever truly appreciate.
For a game denigrated as simple and boring, there is a hell of a lot going on that the dismissive observer is simply too ignorant to pick up on.
December 3rd 2009 @ 2:15pm
LT80 said | December 3rd 2009 @ 2:15pm | Report comment
Actually the real myth is that rugby union is a continous contest for possession, or that a continous contest for possession is somehow the underlying essense of the game.
Of the 4 football codes in this country, Aussie rules and soccer are far closer to a continous contest for possession than either form of rugby.
December 3rd 2009 @ 7:58pm
rugbyfuture said | December 3rd 2009 @ 7:58pm | Report comment
im a rugby union man and id agree to that
December 3rd 2009 @ 8:11pm
Jaredsbro said | December 3rd 2009 @ 8:11pm | Report comment
Now it all comes out. I wasn’t hearing anything about Rugby’s problems circa 2003
Maybe the media has been a bit unfair to Rugby but as Sheek keeps saying Rugby needs to evolve and sometimes it takes the living fossils to die before that’s possible :s
December 8th 2009 @ 6:13pm
Sam said | December 8th 2009 @ 6:13pm | Report comment
It’s not a myth. The contest is mostly for territory in league. A hit up is not a contest for possession. If a player is not tackled one on one, then he can only lose the ball if he makes a mistake, instead it becomes a contest for territory. Increasing possession has become about reducing errors. The only true contest for possession in league is a bomb, and that generally only occurs over or near the try-line because teams don’t want the contest unless there is no territory to lose. The game has definitely removed most of the possessional contests, no doubt about it.
December 3rd 2009 @ 10:41am
Jaredsbro said | December 3rd 2009 @ 10:41am | Report comment
Yeah agree with the reasons why RL will not go back to a contested scrum, but not sure I agree with the fact that there’s no contest for the ball exactly. However I’ve thought for a little while that RL needs a second contest, like every other football code to be a more all-round contest, rather than having a unilateral game-plan which obviously frustrates many a forward. Now in saying that RL does work alright as it is, but why not bring back a contest at the play-the-ball.
And then get rid of Scrums and you’ll still have two meaningful contests: one at the ruck and two in general play, which gives Backs their field to work in (general play) and Forwards the play-the-ball a chance to wage war in the arm wrestle…it may actually get rid of the Grapple(rs). Also the team defending can actually inject some strategy into the process…
December 3rd 2009 @ 11:55am
oikee said | December 3rd 2009 @ 11:55am | Report comment
If you like scrums, why not watch a few union games. Rugby union has a proper scrum. The IRB 7′s has little to no contest of the ball, the fans love this game, so rugby league lies somewhere in the middle. The fans are the people who dont want scrums, we want the game faster, faster, and also want bigger, bigger hits for posession of the ball. The game is totally opposite to rugby union in this respect, Union is all about competing for the ball at every opportunity, rugby league is all about hanging onto the ball.
So one is scrappy, the other is clean. I love watching league because any break-down with the ball is a let-down. Or can be a let-down. So security is paramount. This vastly improves the skill level of the players.
The scrums are clean also to speed the game up, if we went back to scrummage it would be a foot in the wrong direction, their is already a game with scrums.
December 3rd 2009 @ 2:25pm
silver said | December 3rd 2009 @ 2:25pm | Report comment
Oikee, I agree with most of what you said.
December 3rd 2009 @ 8:04pm
Barking Glider said | December 3rd 2009 @ 8:04pm | Report comment
3.21pm on May 28, 1978 at Henson Park. That’s why rugby league doesn’t have competitive scrums.
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/sport/nrl/story/0,26746,23364634-5016291,00.html
December 3rd 2009 @ 8:29pm
Pete said | December 3rd 2009 @ 8:29pm | Report comment
actually as tragic as that story is, that’s not why competitive scrums were taken out of League. By the same logic cars should be banned…
Comp Scrums shouldn’t be brought back to League, they are meaningless to the game. Uncontested scrums give a platform for an attacking opportunity after a restart where players are taken out of the defensive line. Its good. It works. Leave it alone.
December 4th 2009 @ 6:19am
Barking Glider said | December 4th 2009 @ 6:19am | Report comment
Scrums, like cars, aren’t banned. There is however a limit on their speed and power for safety.
December 5th 2009 @ 11:45pm
Corey said | December 5th 2009 @ 11:45pm | Report comment
Safety is not the reason for the scrum being uncontested (how many life-long injuries have you seen in Union scrums), in the 70′s the scrum took too long to set and wasted a lot of the 80 minutes, so instead of stopping the clock they stopped the contest. Union scrums are what you see when they are advertising the game (along with great tries and the like), this contest draws a crowd and for this reason League deserves to have it back.
December 8th 2009 @ 6:16pm
Sam said | December 8th 2009 @ 6:16pm | Report comment
True, and in fact rugby union has reduced the injuries from scrums significantly over the last twenty. That is one reason there are so many rules scrum-time now – most of them are there for safety. Most neck injuries in rugby union now occur at the tackle ball area of the game.
December 4th 2009 @ 1:52am
Daniel said | December 4th 2009 @ 1:52am | Report comment
While the Rugby League scrum is far from perfect, there is no way that we should adopt the over-egged, shouty, time-wasting pantomime that is Rugby Union’s version.
Rugby League, as you say, has a tradition of changing with the times. This is because, unlike Rugby Union (until the advent of open professionalism), it needed to be attractive to the spectators. Rugby League fans won’t be keen on watching, repeatedly-collapsed and repeatedly-reset shoving matches.
And despite the hype and the bellowing (if you look at the stats) Rugby Union scrums rarely result in possession against the feed either. If Rugby League started training scrum specialists, it would also lose the mobile, athletic running forwards who make the game so exciting and replace them with stolid overspecialised plodders.
Both codes’ scrums need looking at for improvements, Rugby League’s more than Union’s, but it needs to be done by people who aren’t living in some la-la land where rose-tinted spectacles obscure their view of what actually happens on the pitch. In Rugby League, the main improvement would be to enforce a straight feed and penalise players who break prematurely from the scrum. In other words, referee the scrum correctly and sensibly.
December 4th 2009 @ 6:13am
Crosscoder said | December 4th 2009 @ 6:13am | Report comment
Agree union scrums look neat and tidy and serve the purpose when they are set and over in one hit.However the bulk of the time there are collapses,resets,and too much damn time wasting.A friend of mine whose son attended Newington,insisted that her son be allowed to play union,on the proviso he was not involved in a scrum in the front row,such was her fear.
There have been some serious injuries in senior ru as a result in which a couple of Aussies have had early retirements .
Whilst rugby league scrums are just a group of guys clasping each other,it serves the purpose of getting the’slower guys” out of the way,and opening the game up for a running game.That is one of the reasons, it gets the Tv ratings.It is not intended to be an obstacle course of technicalities,but a proving ground for courageous, deft hard and straight running and hard tackling.Less energy is expended in scrums,so the forwards do more “open field work”.
And I also agree despite all the hours practising scrummaging,there are few won against the head.A waste of energy for an obvious result IMO.Each to his own .
December 4th 2009 @ 5:24pm
Jaredsbro said | December 4th 2009 @ 5:24pm | Report comment
That is all very well in principle CC but the Scrum in RL does not really achieve that objective anymore. Maybe the backs (or certainly the halfback) gets one or two seconds more than usual but there really is no strategic value in the scrum at all. Why not get rid of it (yeah I know sounds complicated already
) and have a zero-tackle like play-the-ball which gives forwards and backs a chance (and the professional teams space for some much needed play-the-ball strategies rather than resorting to wrestling techniques and other blatant attempts to undermine the spirit of the game) to use their possesion as smartly as possible.
The key would be stop the clock and like with the Goalline Drop-out shot-clock, give say a twenty second break to the forwards or whoever will play-the-ball. If the play-the-ball becomes a contest again then maybe we won’t lose anything from the current arrangement. The bare truth of the matter tho is that the first play after scrums is nigh on a dummy-run, which is about the only efficient use of the first tackle after a scrum these days. Doesn’t require any thought from the player, team or viewer and it basically prohibits creative use of the first tackle.