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“Skrum, skrum, skrum”. That was the pith and essence of Paul Roos’ famous telegram to the 1937 Springboks, on the eve of their historical first-ever series win in New Zealand.
The decisive Test was played at Eden Park on 25th September 1937, and it still represents the last time South Africa has beaten the All Blacks at their spiritual home. A record 58,000 people were crammed into the ground and the areas around it – including treetops and the roofs of houses.
Some of the flavour of the tour, and of the great rugby rivalry between the All Blacks and Springboks in general, is captured very well in this short video:
The 1937 Springbok team was the rugby innovator of its day. It included Danie Craven, the first scrum-half to introduce the world to the diving pass. New Zealand spectators at first chuckled at the novelty, but by the end of the tour, nobody was laughing.
Craven created a try for his team in the winner-takes-all third Test by dummying the long dive-pass and serving the ball instead to wing Freddy Turner from one scrum. The dive-pass was to become de rigeur for number nines around the globe for the next thirty or forty years.
The ’37 Springboks even performed their own answer to the haka, the Jimeloyo-Ji! (a Zulu war-dance) at the Test matches, based on the fluency of their captain Philip Nel with the Zulu language and culture, and it became an important part of their identity.
Perhaps most significantly of all, they also introduced the world to the 3-4-1 scrum formation, with the wing forwards packing on the outside hip of the props rather than in the back row (the 3-2-3).
With tight forwards like the two Louws – ‘Boy’ and Fanie – and Jan Lotz much bigger than those available to New Zealand at the time, South Africa dominated the scrums, as the All Black hooker Artie Lambourn acknowledged after the series was over.
“The Springbok pack was different to any other the All Blacks of that era had played against. Its whole game was centred around the scrum, and the forwards were a scrumming machine. They were all big men, and very strong… and they were tight as a drum. Jan Lotz was a tremendous hooker, but he had the advantage of a massive shove from behind.”
With both hips locked in by the four players in the second row, the props were able to scrum with their feet further back than normal and exert even more pressure, and as Lambourn said ruefully, “they just wore us down in the scrums”.
In the professional game, the 3-4-1 has moved on again in terms of interpretation. Teams recognise that it is now almost impossible (with the huge force and resistance factors being applied) to push absolutely straight and hope to gain any kind of advantage.
The vast majority of top scrumming teams will now try to create a small but subtle angle which they can use to destabilise the opposition forwards before the push comes on.
The tight forwards tend to operate as two groups of three (one prop on each side, with the second row and back row immediately behind him), with the hooker ‘floating’ between the two pods, able to add his weight and know how to either group depending on the call.
The changes are much easier to spot from an overhead angle, and here is one example from a recent England-Ireland game:
This is one reason why hooker has now become such a physically demanding position. Hookers now have to be nearly as big as props so when they shift over to the loose or tight-head side, their presence will make a real difference. At Test level, the days of the sub-105kg hooker are most definitely over!
Having the experience to cope with changes in angle of attack by the opponent (and create your own angles) is what modern professional front row play is all about. Ask Australia’s tighthead Allan Alaalatoa after the recent second Bledisloe Cup game in Dunedin.
Alaalatoa is a very promising prop with all the right physical and mental tools to play his position at international level. However, 2017 represented his first full season of Super Rugby playing on the right side of the scrum. Previously, he had been a loosehead with the Brumbies.
Alaalatoa has also been anointed as one of the Wallaby team leaders by head coach Michael Cheika despite his youth in the position, but it was precisely his lack of experience that proved costly against Joe Moody and the All Black scrum in the first half at Dunedin.
Like his illustrious long-term predecessor Tony Woodcock (and I assume it was Woodcock who taught him the technique), Moody will look to create an angle on the opposing tight-head by ensuring his left foot is as far outside the tighthead’s right foot as possible before the ball is fed into the scrum:
In this frame, Moody’s angle is inwards and it is reinforced by number 20 Ardie Savea’s angle of packing behind him.
In the following reel from the first half (the Wallaby scrums are at 4:20, 8:00, 14:10, 23:50, 32:55 and 39:20), Moody is consistently endeavouring to get that wide base off his left foot which will, in turn, enable him to attack from an angle starting underneath Alaalatoa’s right shoulder, working in towards his sternum.
The crucial action all happens in the two or three-second space between ‘set’ and the actual feed. Where the Australian right pod composed of Alaalatoa, the second-rower behind his left hip (Rob Simmons) and the back-rower on his right (Ned Hanigan) is flat and cohesive at ‘set’, a couple of seconds later it has become fragmented as the inside pressure makes itself felt.
As Moody burrows in deeper into Alaalatoa, Simmons has been forced up and out of his original ‘lock’ position (the top of his head is visible) while Hanigan is bent downwards. Neither can give the Wallaby tight-head the support he needs, with Simmons well above the sweet spot and Hanigan far below it.
The full-scale disintegration at 4:29 is inevitable, with Simmons popping out and Hanigan falling away and into the tunnel.
The process is repeated at the failing scrum in the 14th minute, with Simmons riding over the top and Hanigan completely disengaged on the side:
Unfortunately for the All Blacks, the angle of the drive also creates a big disconnect between their back row and Aaron Smith, which Will Genia is able to exploit to make the break.
Although the Wallabies went on to score that opportunistic try, they also lost three of their six feeds to turnovers due to the scrum pressure, and that led to the introduction of Tatafu Polota-Nau and Sekope Kepu off the bench on either side of half-time.
The impact of Kepu’s experience on the tighthead side, in particular, was clear and immediate.
Although it is not easy to see the mechanics of the process on the far side of a scrum, the fact that there is so little difference in Australian body-shape and height over the right side, at ‘set’ and just before the feed, is obvious from the first two screenshots.
Kepu has achieved stability and the pod around him remains functional because of that.
The second sequence at a scrum near the Australian goal-line shows Kepu on the counter-attack. As Moody widens out his hips to attack on the angle, Kepu feels the developing space between the All Black loosehead and his hooker and drills straight through it.
Both the left-side lock (Sam Whitelock) and flanker (Ardie Savea) lose their connection with Moody as Kepu counter-attacks, and the angle he creates affords the Wallaby number eght, Sean McMahon, a few invaluable easy metres off the base, enabling Australia to clear their lines.
The two scrums (at 44:10 and 56:20) can be watched in real time on the second half reel here:
Summary
Scrumming is a living part of South African rugby heritage, reaching all the way back to the 3-4-1 innovation of the 1937 Springboks.
With Malcolm Marx now solidly installed as one of the biggest and strongest scrumming hookers in world rugby at around 120kgs, they will be looking to target what may be seen as a soft Australian underbelly at the set-piece in Perth next weekend.
Whether the underbelly is really as soft as the first half at Dunedin suggested is another matter. With Marx alongside him, Tendai ‘the Beast’ Mtawarira may be fancying his chances of angling into Allan Alaalatoa in much the same way as he once did to Phil Vickery in the first Test of the series between the British and Irish Lions and South Africa back in 2009.
But if Sekope Kepu starts, I doubt there will be any significant advantage for the Beast at all. Kepu has earned his stripes over a long, 82-cap Test career, and he has most of the answers to the modern problems posed by changes of angle and three-man ‘pod-work’ at the scrum.
The referee will be New Zealand’s Glen Jackson, and he will not want the mechanics at scrum time to dominate proceedings as a whole. It might have been very different with Romain Poite or Pascal Gauzere, or another Top 14 referee in charge!