The Curse Of Uncontested Scrums - Surely There Must Be A Better Way?

A lady sent me an e-mail last week and said I had not been grumpy enough lately. Well Madam if there is one thing guaranteed to make an old prop not only grumpy but to become a totally miserable old git then it has to be uncontested scrums. I hate them!

If the Lions series defeat at Pretoria was not bad enough the sight of those great lumps of bone and muscle doing their version of the 'Ladies Excuse Me' must have made the old Boer farmers from the Northern Transvaal squirm in their seats. I know I did. What is more for all this to happen at Loftus Versfeld too - the spiritual home of the Blue Bulls and scrummaging - what a sacrilege. All we needed was to have Bruce Forsyth prancing about the pitch simpering "Didn't they all do well?" to have completed the misery. Ugh.

We Pirates do not have to go back very far for us to have suffered from the fiasco as well. Who can forget that farce at Birmingham-Solihull which resulted in the club being docked three points after Peter Cook was sin-binned and Sam Heard exacerbated a back injury as soon as he came on? Nobody could blame the match officials or even the National One committee reviewing the case - it was just a stupid rule to start with.

So what can be done? Even as one who is about as pleased to see an 'Elf and Safety Inspector coming my way as a dose of swine flu, I fully accept that the prospect of severe spinal injury to a player must be avoided at all costs. Indeed the plight of a young man like Matthew Hampson is truly heartbreaking - and there have been quite a few others. So accepting that safety is paramount, I again pose the question "Is there a better way?"

Rugby is not the only sport where significant changes have been instituted for safety - motor racing being an obvious example.

My niece competes all over the world as a professional Three Day Event rider and the parallels between that sport and rugby both in terms of deaths and paralysis are considerable. Indeed having several hundredweight of horse come crashing down upon you is about the closest thing you can ever get to being trapped under a collapsed scrum.

However, by a scientific approach to course design and some major advances in lightweight synthetic body armour, huge strides in safety terms have been made without ruining the sport as a competition or as a spectacle which the uncontested scrum rule clearly does.

Well let's begin with some simple physics. Modern coaches set enormous store by co-ordinating the 'hit' as the scrums engage to gain an initial advantage. So if the scrums line up with all sixteen men standing back and then crunching together the resulting impact is enormous. If the average weight of the forwards is sixteen stone (and it is often more) then that mass alone is well over one and a half tons over which the forward momentum serves to multiply the impact.

The 'crouch - touch- engage' routine has certainly helped in so far as packs no longer charge at each other but why not have the front rows go down first and hold, the locks to then go in, with the No 8 and flankers joining third? Not only would this be very much safer but I would suggest would massively reduce the number of scrums tediously collapsing to the ground and having to be reset constantly. Once down the players could push and scrummage as much as they liked - but only when the ball was put in.

The arbiters of the Laws also seem to labour under the pious illusion that as long as a team has enough 'recognised' props then somehow all is well.

This is utter nonsense. Some props are clearly bigger, stronger, fitter or more experienced than others and, as in any combined skill, are also heavily dependent upon the other players around them.

Indeed I would suggest that one of the most dangerous points occur when a semi-exhausted man, who has been battling away for seventy minutes, suddenly finds himself confronted by a testosterone-fuelled replacement who has been kicking his heels on the bench for over an hour. The authorities turn a blind eye to that one.

There are a number of practical steps which the sport in general - and a team in isolation - could take in the current climate.

One would be to coach all players in the basic art of front row play just as they all have to tackle, maul and ruck. Indeed certain players could have a 'Certificate of Competence' to show that they have played a certain number of hours in the front row during a competitive game - rather as amateur pilots do with flying hours also in the interests of safety.

This would be of value to the player when negotiating a contract with a club as it would mean that a man who would probably play virtually the whole season as a flanker or a line breaking centre could be always be called upon by his club to prop in an emergency and stay within both the rules and practical safety.

Certainly I would not employ specialist hookers who cannot double up as props - especially on the tight head. The Springbok captain Smit is a prime example of this and I understand that Pirates new front rower Brits can do likewise as indeed did Cook last season. Good move.

Furthermore it intrigues me as to why coaches continue to put all eight players into an uncontested scrum awarded to the opposition. By definition the other team cannot push them off the ball anyway so why not put just five or even three in the scrum and have the rest lining up five metres back in defence? Answers on a postcard please.

So my three little suggestions are a) more players in a team coached and cleared to be able to prop b) to have each row of a scrum engaging one by one and c) not allowing purely tactical substitutions of props in the last twenty minutes of a match.

Yes we all know coaches could cheat with feigned injuries but no more than they do already with many so-called 'blood replacements'.

Well here are a few initial ideas - shoot them down by all means - but let us have some other suggestions. Whatever is tried it surely has to be better than these pathetic barn-dancing routines.

Grump over - I will now go and lie down in a darkened room.

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