Scrumming: It can be done
Even within the current process of scrumming, better scrumming can be achieved. In the rain and the wet in Limerick on a miserable Tuesday night, two packs proved that there is no excuse for the blight of rotten scrumming.
At present the worst scrumming sides in international rugby amongst Top Tier nations are Australia and Ireland. On Tuesday night the one pack was Australian, the other Irish and they were in heated contest. The figures speak for themselves:
21 scrums, 1 reset, 3 collapses, 2 free kicks, 2 penalties.
It's not perfect but a world's better than last Saturday's mess - and in worse conditions than any last Saturday's. When Australia played - and beat - New Zealand in perfect conditions in Hong Kong, they put the ball into 10 scrums. There were 8 resets, 9 collapses, 2 free kicks and 3 penalties. When they played - and beat - Wales under the closed roof in Cardiff, they were penalised 7 times.
The weather is not the problem.
When Munster played Australia, the engage procedure was long and slow, but the forwards coped.
The procedure is not the problem.
It also appears that neither Australians nor Irishmen are congenitally incapable of scrumming. They can scrum. In fact there have been times when both countries have produced dominant scrums. The same applies to New Zealand whose scrum was penalised four times in the second half against Scotland. There seems no reason why Samoans can scrum so much better than Irishmen.
There were two penalty tries this last weekend at scrum time. The one was for France against Fiji, the other for Italy against Argentina.
Against Argentina! They are the great inventors of modern scrumming through the engineer Francisco Ocampo who developed the Bajada, the pride of Argentinian rugby - a pride shattered in Verona on Saturday.
Whatever the reason, the malaise still exists. Is it a refereeing problem at all? When the SANZAR coaches, referees and refereeing officials met in Sydney last year they made scrumming one of the target areas. One of the things everybody accepted was that the onus of responsibility for scrumming rested on the players, which makes sense. After all it is the player's wellbeing that is in jeopardy from collapsed scrums and, just as obviously, referees do not collapse scrums. (After all collapsed scrums are the root of the problem.)
The result of this shift of responsibility is that referees are quicker to penalise. In Hong Kong Alain Rolland freekicked the first two early engages by Australia and penalised the third for repeated infringement. That had a braking effect but it has not removed the problem, as the November figures suggest. Penalising is not enough.
The tackle was one of the other areas to be targetted. It is, after all, the illegitimate child of rugby. Pretty well every tackle can be penalised. Last weekend there were 126 penalties in 6 Top Tier matches. &9 of those penalties were for tackle infringements - that is 63%. That would suggest that tackles are a bigger problem than tackles but that is not the case as they do not suck time out of the match the way reset scrums do. The problem is much smaller - not 50 out of 50. There were 1 074 tackles of various kinds in the six matches for 126 penalties - 126 problems out of 1 074 incidents.
At the tackle, referees have greater power. They have the power of the yellow card. And they use it. In the Munster-Australia match there were two yellow cards for tackle/ruck/maul infringements.
In theory the option of the yellow card for front row infringements also exists. In practice? It is as rare as a free kick for a crooked scrum-feed. If two wrong engagements become repeated infringements and a penalty, surely the referee would like to take it further, the way he does with the tackle, but can he afford to?
Send the prop to the sin bin and bring on another prop. And then? What happens if the problem is not solved? Do you send the next one off as well and go to uncontested scrums, that abomination of desolation in the words of the Prophet Daniel? There are even teams who would welcome uncontested scrums, humiliating as that may be.
After the SANZAR meeting there was a statement that teams regularly infringing would be told to pull up their socks and if they did not do so they would be exposed.
Exposing has not happened. Telling teams to pull up their socks may have happened and may be happening, but if it is it is not obvious. The thought of saying to Australia or Ireland: "Sorry till you can scrum, you cannot play", is too ridiculous and will not happen.
What would happen if international teams with scrumming problems were required to bring along not two front-row reserves but six? Then four to six could be used only in the case of sending off.
As a first resort what about considering a change of Law. Change the law and you change the game. Perhaps changing the scrumming law could help to solve the scrumming problem.
But how?