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(L to R) Australian rugby union players Salesi Ma'afu, Huia Edmonds and Ben Alexander practice a scrum formation during a training session in Sydney. AAP Image/Paul Miller.
Just when rugby was getting back to being an expansive, skillful game with adjusted laws at the ruck and maul that reward attacking play, a blight is descending on the game that threatens to destroy the green shoots.
That blight is the modern scrum with its endless collapses, its time wasting by beefy front rows and its often strange policing by referees who often don’t seem to know that they are doing.
At Gosford on Tuesday night, a game that won applause from an enthusiastic crowd at half-time when the players trotted off the field, was brought to a standstill when the referee Steve Walsh forced the Australian Barbarians to scrum again when they virtually had the ball in the hands of the halfback.
The scrum was reset. Why? Then Walsh penalised the Barbarians. After that the scrums began to resemble peace conferences with the players standing around getting ready to get on with the war. The game degenerated after all this. It was a relief when the final whistle was blown.
Whenever someone from this part of the world suggests reforms or improvements to the way scrums are managed the usual suspects in the British media start to get all agitated and make the nonsensical claims that the southern hemisphere countries want to de-power the scrum because they can’t scrum themselves.
This is nonsense. New Zealand, South Africa and the Argentina have sides with terrific scrums and have no interest in de-powering the scrum. Nor does Australia. Right now there are difficulties with the Wallabies because so many leading front rowers are out injured. But at the Super rugby level the Australian scrums more than held their own.
The reason why the scrums need to be fixed by the IRB – and urgently – is to build on the way the game has evolved into a real rugby contest with the changes to the tackled ball law. Get the scrums right, and this means contested scrums but no time-wasting and phony tricks in the manner of the England pack at Perth last week, and the game has a splendid springboard into its worldwide exposure next year with the World Cup tournament.
Here are a few modest proposals, with supporting comments, that should be considered for 2011 by the IRB:
1. Stop the clock when a scrum is ordered. Start the clock when the scrum has been resolved with the ball out or a penalty awarded.
It is clear that in the northern hemisphere, particularly, scrum time is being as smoko time by packs that can’t keep up with the pace of the modern game.
2. Penalise packs that waste time.
There is a provision to penalise sides that delay throwing the ball into the lineout. Put a similar provision in for scrums. We want to stop this nonsense of sides squatting ready to scrum and then pulling back, standing up before preparing to get ready to scrum a bit.
3. Reduce the scrum calls to two: ‘Touch’ ‘Pack!”
The sides should be told to crouch without this being formalised. If sides play for time, penalise them then and there.
The ‘Touch’ “Pack!’ calls should flow quickly. No notable pause.
The instruction ‘Pack’ is the right word to use, rather than ‘Scrum!’ (my earlier suggestion) and ‘Engage!’ because as a reader of The Roar pointed out it is one syllable.
Sides can lock shoulders as soon as they hear the word ‘Pack!’ and make contact after the word is finished. But with the two-syllable ‘Engage!’ and presumably if ‘Scrum! (a one-a-half-syllable word) contact is made often before the word is finished.
Then referees sometimes penalised sides – unfairly for an early engagement.
4. When the referee calls ‘Pack’ he should have his hands on both props and join them together.
This would ensure that both sides get a fair hit.
5. Once the hit is made the halfback should immediately put the ball into the scrum. The packs should be allowed to scrum as soon as the hit is made.
A great deal of the problems with scrums is centered on the halfback refusing to put the ball in (the Gregan manoeuvre) until his pack has a sort of ascendancy.
Wayne Barnes, who had an excellent match in the New Zealand – Ireland match (only 6 penalties in the first half) penalised the All Blacks scrum for pushing off the mark. Later on he warned the Irish halfback about delaying his feed.
The halfback should have been penalised, not the All Blacks.
6. Once the ball is in a position to be released from the scrum, the scrum should be allowed to continue.
This brings us to the incident at Gosford. If Walsh had allowed play to go on, we might not have had the ensuing delays and so on that followed the reset.
None of these suggestions make any fundamental change to the nature of the scrum as a contest between two packs. What they do, in fact, is to allow the contest to be on a level playing play.
There needs to be a fundamental shift, too, in the way the northern hemisphere rugby establishment views scrums. They see the scrum as an ned in itself. They are happy therefore to see endless scrumming chewing up the clock and the flow of penalties that emerge when scrums become a mess.
The southern hemisphere view is that the scrum is a distinctive part of rugby where there is a shoulder-to-shoulder contest between the two packs. Teams with strong scrums should be rewarded for their strength. And under my suggestions this is what would happen with a good scrum giving a great platform for back attacks, and a poor scrum putting teams under pressure.
But in the end, the scrum, like the lineout and the kick-offs, is really a way to re-start the game. This is the justification for stopping the clock for scrums until they are completed.
There are two further points that need to be made.
First, it was the northern hemisphere unions that killed off the ELVs proposal for only short-arm penalties from scrums, unless foul play was involved. This suggestion should be revived.
Second, in first class matches there is always a spare referee to cover for the referee and the assistant referees in cause of an injury. This spare referee should be brought on to the field for scrums and stood on the side not covered by the referee.
At Perth we had the Welsh referee Nigel Owens convinced that all the scrum sins were being committed by the Wallabies. So whenever the scrum went down, he penalised Australia. Some, but not all, but definitely some of these infringements were committed by the England props. They waited until the referee was on the other side and then pulled the scrum down, and won the penalty.
What we want in rugby is scrums like lineouts that are contested but do not take up an inordinate amount of time to take place. Lifting was brought into lineouts to get around its illegal use, which was hard to detact (like props collapsing the scrums).
Stephen Jones of the UK Sunday Times predicted rather fearlessly (and stupidly?) that there would never be another lineout in Test rugby won against the throw. Tell that to opponents of Victor Matfield!
The point here is that the systems was modernised and cleaned up in the scrums, as they have been in the lineouts, we will get the contested scrum and strong packs getting their just reward for their dominance.
Right now the scrum is a mess, as lineouts were in the days when they were described as ‘dockyard brawls.’
So we have this memo to the IRB. Fix the mess, and we reckon the ideas put forward here will go a long way to achieving this.