If you believe the official statistics emanating from the refereeing department of Sanzar, then the number of scrums per game is marginally down on years 2005 and 2006, but the number of free kicks and penalties emanating from rugby union’s trademark has significantly increased.
Most of the blame for the increase can be laid at the door of the engagement and the real culprit is the amendment that demands the front rows touch each other first before binding. What tends to happen is that props touch with all the tenderness of divorcees and then withdraw, so that everyone is off-balance when the ”engage” call comes.
Ian Macintosh, the former Springbok coach, was on the panel that devised the new laws and wonders whether officials have misinterpreted the intention of the ”touch”. Safety is what the International Rugby Board is after, so why not do away with the ”touch” completely, dump the ”engage” and get the front row to bind first, scrum later.
Ultimately, the scrum is a way of restarting the game after the ball has gone dead. Naturally it is important to make it a safe contest, with the accent, hopefully, on contest.
Yet the real sickness in the game is not a set piece, but something that typically happens after the line-out.
Last week the Sharks scored three of their four tries against the Hurricanes from the driving maul.
In this tactic the ball is held at the back of a phalanx of forwards who drive up-field, safe in the knowledge that there isn’t a damn thing the opposition can do to stop them or steal the ball. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the All Blacks under the captaincy of Buck Shelford turned what was then called the rolling maul into an art form.
The lawmakers tried to get rid of it but, like a clever virus, it mutated and came back again. No one likes it — least of all the coaches who use it best, like Dick Muir and Heyneke Meyer. But as long as it is legal there is no point in coming up with anything else.
Muir, for one, laments on a weekly basis the failure of his team to turn possession into points, blaming a multi-talented backline who squander the hard-won ball of the forwards.
He should worry. His team have won six in a row, are hot favourites to make it seven against the Brumbies this week, and sit proudly atop the log. Yet Muir is unsatisfied because he is an old romantic, who believes that forwards are there to win the ball and backs are there to use it.
In 1997 he was part of the high-water mark of post-isolation Springbok rugby, as Nick Mallett’s inside centre for five of the famous 17-Test unbeaten run. It included a 50-point demolition of France in Paris, something that seems almost impossible to conceive a decade on, but was no less unlikely at the time.
The point is that Muir had the gift of making things happen as a player and it has not deserted him as a coach. He knows better than anyone that this Sharks team is capable of far more than it has shown us to date.