THIS blog has long argued - the biggest problem facing 21st century Rugby Union is its laws and the way they are policed by referees. It has long been understood that, in the professional game, teams play the referee rather than the laws - wrong, wrong, wrong; laws should be absolute and enforced universally across the entire game.
On Friday night, for instance, Glasgow, for all they played badly and didn't show the gallusness and chutzpah which they had displayed since the season started, were cheated out of possible victory by a Munster side, and in particular skipper Doncha O'Callaghan, who played the Welsh referee, Mr Davies, far better than Glasgow.
To be fair, Mr Davies didn't actually do too-much wrong, in terms of his application of the Laws. Brilliant solo effort though it was, the Munster try should never have been allowed - the scrum feed was squint, there was strong indication of a hand being used to hook the ball back and, just maybe, Glasgow ought to have made more of a fuss than they did at the time.
But, these incidents tend to even themselves out; what did grate was the way Mr Davies allowed O'Callaghan to referee the game - even at his football peak, Willie Miller never got away with half as much as big Doncha did at Scotstoun.
A strong referee would have told O'Callaghan, midway through the first half: "You, get out of my face, shut up and play and if you complain again, you'll have ten minutes to think about it;" - then acted.
But no, Mr Davies allowed the big lock to run the game - which made it all the more galling that big Al Kellock, a man who could have happily gone head-to-head with O'Callaghan in the awkward squad, wasn't there to remind the referee of his obligations to run the game fairly.
I reckon O'Callaghan successfully talked about a couple of minutes out of the Munster yellow-card. Also, the Irish side cheated outrageously at the breakdown and at the scrum and got away with it. It left a bitter taste.
NOW we come to another associated point. The new engagement protocol at set scrums has, by and large, worked. However, the fall-out from the old: "crouch, touch, pause, engage" etc protocol remains.
In particular, we have bred a generation of hookers who, to put it bluntly - don't know how to hook. Last week, watching the Ayr pack being systematically destroyed by a superior Cornish Pirates outfit, who simply pushed them off their own ball every time, I caught the eye of a fellow old boy of the Front Five Club. We two old donkeys said, as one: "Channel One ball", before releasing, this is a concept which the present generation of donkeys have never heard of.
It gets worse, after Saturday's Ayr v Stirling County match, I was in the company of four guys who effectively have PhDs in the dark arts of the scrummage: County legend "Muff" Scobie, Ayr Director of Rugby Jock Craig and that one-man wrecking ball of a disruptive tight-head, Johnny Burston and Gordon Strachan, a man who, as a Dickinson Disciple, knows all about scrummaging.
Craig, the only one still anywhere near the coal-face said: "I've tried to show these young guys how the scrum works when the hooker has to hook, but, they've come through the Glasgow/SRU system, so, they have been brain-washed into believing that what they are doing is correct, which it isn't.
"The whole front row landscape has been changed by the new: "Crouch, bind, engage" rule, but, they are not adapting. It's very frustrating.
There were a couple of occasions on Saturday when Ayr hooker Fergus Scott, who is in the Glasgow development programme, struck perfectly, but the ball rebounded off his loose-head's inside leg and into the County second row. That has to be bad footplacement - had that been right, Ayr would have had perfect Channel One Ball with which to attack.
Here in Scotland we cannot match the behemoths in England, so, we have to be smarter and I don't think, at this juncture, Murrayfield and Scotstoun are being all that smart.
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