Law Discussion: The crumbling scrums
What on earth do you do about scrums that keep falling down? The IRB has issued directives and the SANZAR countries have put in ‘name and shame’ possibilities, but still the problem is not solved – not nearly solved.
In the second week of June there were four big matches and the statistics from those four matches have a story to tell. The matches are:
New Zealand vs Ireland
South Africa vs France
Argentina vs Scotland
Australia vs England.
The last one is the interesting one when the IRB has been complaining about resets and how they cannibalise playing time and collapses which are annoying and dangerous.
Here are scrum stats for each match – just scrums:
New Zealand vs Ireland: Scrums: 8 – 3 resets, 5 collapses, 3 free kicks
South Africa vs France: Scrums: 22 – 8 resets, 4 collapses, 2 free kicks, 3 penalties
Argentina vs Scotland: Scrums: 18 – 4 resets, 4 collapses, 5 free kicks, 1 penalty.
Then comes the match in Perth
Australia vs England: Scrums: 25 – 11 resets, 32 collapses, 2 free kicks, 9 penalties, 2 penalty tries
That last is a frightening statistic – 32 collapses, 9 penalties, 2 penalty tries.
Percentages collapses: 123%
Percentage penalties: 44%
Percentages in the other three:
Percentages collapses: 63%, 18%, 22%
Percentage penalties: 0%, 13%, 11%
The totals for three matches were:
Scrums: 48
Resets: 15
Collapses: 13
Those figures are too high – 31% resets, 27% collapses
That is too high when the aim for each is zero.
Too high but nothing like 123% and 44%.
It’s not that the referees are doing nothing but they can only react and for them it must be a nightmare. In the Australian case, apart from resetting, the Wallabies were punished 13 times. 11 penalties at the scrum is huge in 80 minutes. Two penalty tries in a match is exceptional.
The referee also sent an Australian prop to the sin bin so that somebody else could come and try to play prop.
For a while before this match it looked as if Australian scrummaging was improved with Benn Robinson and Ben Alexander but now we are left with young graduates from the Bill Young School of Scrumming, and it’s bad.
It’s bad for the game.
Australia are the country that shouted loudest for a more attractive game to help them in their competition with Rules, league and soccer. But this problem is of their own making.
In this match scrumming used up 19 minutes 44 seconds of the game out of 80 minutes. There is no stoppage time added for resets and so on, which means that nearly a quarter of the match was taken by scrumming.
The temptation is to make radical changes to the scrum, in the rugby league way, or go over in matches like this to uncontested scrums.
Getting rid of scrums would change the nature of the game and those who play the game radically. We are proud that our game is a game for all shapes and sizes. Depower the scrums and you remove one of those shapes from the game.
In a case like this a match going to uncontested scrums would have delighted the Australians and frustrated the English. Those doing wrong would have benefited; those doing right would have suffered. And it would make rugby insipid.
So what is there to do?
The referee in this match tried as hard as possible to keep the game going. Perhaps he should not have. He allowed the ball to be cleared from collapsed scrums but perhaps if he had laid down a standard earlier, it may have got a result sooner. Perhaps if he had insisted that Australia get the ball into the scrum as soon as the front rows joined, as the law actually requires, it may have been better. In both those suggestions may is a big word.
Suggesting that a team that scrums as badly as the Wallabies do get suspended from matches of this nature till it can cope with scrumming will not happen – it’s a commercially wonky idea.
You could suspend from Test rugby a prop found unsuited to scrummaging, but then presumably his team brings in somebody regarded as inferior to himself.
But there should be pressure of some sort to get weak scrummagers to scrummage lawfully. There cannot be anything genetically different in Australians that makes scrumming such a problem. They cannot be more genetically unsuited to scrumming than Englishmen. And it’s not just the props fault, though it may be mainly theirs. Were the Wallaby locks slow to get down because they did not enjoy the chore of scrumming and so gave their front row little impetus?
One would have thought that a team’s pride would ensure an improvement. When the B&I Lions toured South Africa, they were destroyed in the scrum in the first Test but not again. They got it right.
Maybe the solution lies in pride. Maybe the Australians will not enjoy being a sporting laughingstock and make a real effort to get their scrumming right.
