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This will never happen. Indeed, I’m weeing into the wind. But you should still hear it, even just to acknowledge one last guttural lamentation of a dinosaur. Rugby league should bring back the scrum.
You read correctly: bring back the scrum.
Presently we have a joke, a ritual handover, an odd little truce in an otherwise ferocious 80 minutes. It’s Christmas Day on The Somme.
We have two packs of forwards (or whoever’s in for a breather) agreeing that “we will not contest” and “we will not contest either”.
Ironically, a fair scrum, in which the ball goes straight into the tunnel and two packs push, is against the ‘spirit’ (for want of a better word) of the game. A scrum’s only purpose is to restart the match with 12 players gathered on one bit of the field.
They could as well make them form nude human pyramids. Perhaps they should, and award prizes for most creative.
People say they’re a joke, and get rid of them. But why not do what they should have done years ago, and police them?
Rather than tossing scrums into the too-hard basket because they were ‘messy’, set about improving them. Make them contests. Tighten them up. Make the forwards bind, pack and lock horns. And push, you bastards! Push!
Make referees enforce laws, make decisions. Make the halfback – or better still the pocket referee or touch judge – feed the ball straight into the tunnel. Make ‘hookers’ worthy of the name. Make props, loose- and tight-head, battle. Make back-rowers work.
Old cousin rugby union has three and four re-packed scrums, long minutes of inaction followed by a mystery penalty, and nobody wants that.
Or do we? Should we?
Packs asserting dominance, all the chicanery, the contest, the unknown; the battle at scrum time among nigh-on 900 kilograms of man-meat is a large element of Rah-Rah, and – don’t laugh – it’s a good thing. People enjoy that. There is story in it. And people love story.
Powering up scrums would, importantly, tire out forwards. Contesting scrums is hard, physical work. To make a scrum powerful, all six forwards – but particularly what union calls the ‘tight five’ – have to bind tightly with one another. A tight scrum is a strong one. Six men, tight, together, can push back a tractor. And with a go-forward scrum and a clever hooker, scrum wins are possible without the loosehead and feed.
That makes the game less predictable. And predictable – as rugby league can be – is bad. Because we know how the story goes.
Give the team without the feed a chance to win the ball back and they could be more attacking, particularly in their own half. The passage of play within an attacking team’s half can be as stultifying as any series of re-packed scrums. You know what’s going to happen.
A mate of mine can ‘commentate’ rugby league games ahead of time: “Kick off. Half will catch it. He’ll pass to a forward who’ll crash. Play the ball, pass. Crash. Play the ball, pass. Crash. Two passes off the ruck, and kick.”
Watch a game – he’s right nearly all the time.
But tighten up the scrum, give the tighthead team a chance of winning the ball back? Well, why not attack the other mob on the wings early? Have a crack? Kick it to Marika Koroibete on the fly in your own half.
For sure, tighten up the scrum and there would be cheating. Scrums were once arcane, nasty bits of kit contested by toothless pickpockets. Referees could pluck out penalties against both teams for loose arms, second-row feeds, ‘feet across’, phantom biting. Scrums were messy.
But messy isn’t the worst thing.
Rugby league too often wants clean. Rugby league wants crisp, completed sets, perfect adjudication, and consistency! How often do people bay for that? But there never has been and there never will ever be consistency, because what people really mean is perfection. And there’s no such thing.
You can do your best to strive towards it – the bunker boys will have more hits than misses – but there is no perfect.
Besides, some of the best things in sport are imperfect, random and unscripted. And players cheating is not a reason not to police something.
Some years ago well-meaning law-makers sought to cease messiness and ambiguity – accursed ambiguity – and scrums became rituals. So we said goodbye to the one of the few remaining contests for possession.
A few weekends ago I was sideline at Saints vs Rabbitohs at the Sydney Cricket Ground for a yarn about the late, great commentator Frank Hyde, and saw a brutal game.
In the wet, two packs of hard-bodied, committed footballers fairly hurled themselves at each other. It was blood and bone, bruises, hand-to-hand combat, two crack squads of ninjas and man-beasts. And it was terrific rugby league, even in the slop.
Except for the scrums. They were pathetic. Mr Hyde wouldn’t have known where to look. In one scrum the front-rows hadn’t even brushed ears before the ball was under the lock’s feet, out and away.
Now, people will say that’s good! More action. But these people are wrong.
Sorry, they mean well, but the flow-on effect of effete, ritual, pathetic joke scrums is predictability. And you don’t want to know in advance what happens in the story, do you? Where’s the fun in that?
Mind you, nude pyramids would be entertaining.