Last Saturday, a young coach I have been working with asked me to watch his under-16 team play. The match was being played in the shadow of the Pyrenees in Perpignan. While the view was majestic, it was bitterly cold. The outside temperature on my car’s thermometer displayed a discouraging 8 degrees. As I pulled on my gloves, not for the last time that day, I asked myself why do I want to watch this match?
Kids play the game for many reasons. One of the most important things is that they want to be like their heroes. Bizarre haircuts with shaved temples trailing into scraggy mullets, coloured boots and taped wrists graffitied with crucifixes were all seen in this group of under-16s.
What I had not anticipated was that the young referee, who looked to be only a few years older than the players, was also imitating his professional refereeing role models. He was rocking two smoothly shaved legs.
I do not mention this out of any sense of judgment. It’s just that in my observations, the removal of lower limb hair does not aid the referee’s decision making processes.
Pen in hand, I scribbled some notes to provide feedback to my friend. Here is a summation of some of those observations.
Scrum. Penalty. Kick to touch. Maul.
Scrum. Penalty. Kick to touch. Maul.
Scrum. Penalty. Yellow card to the loosehead prop. (No, I am not making this up. It happened.) Kick to touch. Maul.
As I turned up the car heater and headed home, I felt sorry for those kids who were denied the fun that playing a game of rugby once created. They had to suffer through 28 penalties, with the ball coming out of the many scrums only once. This is not the type of experience that gets you hooked on our game for life.
Nestled back in the warmth of my living room, I was primed to put the disappointment of the under-16s behind me and watch Ireland against the Boks, followed by the Wallabies in Paris. What I did not realise was that every game I watched last Saturday was to be a repeat of the one before.
Devoured by scrummaging
A few hours later, as the snow began to fall on the Stade de France after full time, I had viewed 240 minutes of rugby, much of which was devoured by scrummaging. The non-play, the nothingness, that resulted from the multiple penalties and cards that spewed from those scrums meant that the ball had hardly reached any backline player from all of those setpieces.
We need scrums. They are an integral part of our culture and they remain the best attacking platform for backlines in rugby. Our problem is that highly intelligent coaches are using tactics that exploit the game’s outdated scrummaging laws in a manner that forces referees to award penalties.
This was never the intended purpose of scrums. Law 19 on scrums clearly states that “the purpose of a scrum is to restart play with a contest for possession after a minor infringement or stoppage”. The key phrase is “to restart play”. Today, if a team loses the contest in a scrum, play is never restarted because the current interpretation of the law demands that the loser of the contest be penalised.
Rugby prides itself on the concept that every aspect of our game, be it the tackle or catching a high ball, is a contest. Scrums are the only contest where teams are penalised if they don’t win. In the past, getting pushed backwards in the scrum was never a penalty.
There is nothing in the intention or spirit of our law book that supports this situation.
From the horrible match we witnessed at the Aviva last weekend, across two World Cup cycles and into junior competitions, scrums are now spewing out penalties and yellow cards that are determining match outcomes and robbing our creative backline players of the opportunity to participate.
We have been here before.
Scrums in the late 1970s had become what we see today. A mess, where referees awarded penalties that were, at best, an educated guess. In the 1980s, the wisdom of our leadership changed the laws so that only foul play and offside could be penalised in scrums. Every other infringement was a bent arm free kick, so teams could not take shots at penalty goal, drop goals or kick for touch from these technical infringements.
As penalties for technical infringements were gone, teams that had won the contest stopped holding possession in the scrum. They liberated the ball and play was restarted. Which is exactly what the law book states scrums should do.
This ushered in an epoch of gorgeous backline and back row attack that was launched from scrums.
Perhaps the pinnacle example of these law changes was Australia’s last-minute try in the 1991 RWC quarter-final at Lansdowne Road. The time taken from awarding the Wallabies a scrum, through its formation, winning the scrum contest for possession, then six Australian backline passes before Michael Lynagh dived over and broke Irish hearts, took all of 29 seconds. All 30 players from both teams were involved in that crowded half a minute of play.
How rugby has returned to a situation that was resolved 40 years ago is a sordid tale of strategic and methodical political manipulation of rugby’s legislative processes, alongside the influencing of officials to interpret the contest for scrummaging as binary. Winners who push forward and losers who go backwards and are then penalised.
All of this damage was inflicted on our game with the sole aim of empowering a few international teams at the expense of the entire world game.
Rugby is in the entertainment business. Entertaining those who pay to watch games and those who experience the joy of playing. As entertainment, last Saturday was a disaster. Our current scrum laws are the foundational reason of why our game is failing on both fronts.
If Rugby 360 becomes a reality and modifies the scrum laws to increase ball in play time, reduce the number of penalties to encourage running rugby by returning the adjudication of our scrums to the excellent laws of the past, then it will be a success.
If Rugby 360 flourishes, the responsibility will rest firmly on the shoulders of our leaders at World Rugby, who have continuously ignored the existential threats that our scrum laws and adjudicating system currently pose to our game.
