Will We Ever Sort-Out The Scrum?

THIS IS an easy week for we bloggers, commentators and opinion-formers in the international rugby media – we don't need to sweat blood to come up with the big talking point – that was provided by events in Dublin on Sunday.

I just wonder, however, if the “suits” who man the desks at Rugby House, a short distance away from the Aviva Stadium, will have arrived at work on Monday morning and thought: “Jaysus, but dat was embarrassing – what are we going to do to prevent a recurrence?”

(Pardon my descent into cod WoganIrish there, couldn't help it).

Any way, while the adherence to the Laws of the Game which saw Sir Bill Beaumont & Co with what we Scots call: “A big reddy,” ought to have a high-level meeting convened with the sole aim of preventing such an embarrassing moment ever happening again – Ah hae ma doots.

The World Rugby way of dealing with such a PR disaster has always been: kick the matter into the long grass, keep the head down and hope the storm passes; then, several months later, do as little as they can get away with to stir things up further.

I can understand the reasoning behind the need to – when a side is forced to resort to unopposed scrums – mitigate against any fiddling of the laws to gain an advantage, but, as I said in my last blog – the protocol which World Rugby came up with is a classic case of The Law of Unintended Consequences. It was never meant to leave the game with egg on its face.

For my part, I honestly believe unopposed scrums, which are fine on safety grounds, only really come into play at the elite level of the game. Down at the grass-roots, with dear old Michael Green's Extra B XV playing Coarse Rugby, if a scrum goes down, it's more-likely to be because none of the four props has enough puff to hold themselves up, rather than nefarious practising of the black arts by one or more props.

We have discussed, long and often, what is to be done about the almost unrefereeable abomination which the scrum has become. How do we beautify this plook on the face of the game?

Well, here's Aristotle's flash of left-field thinking – let's go back to the future.

Read the Laws of the Game, Law 19 – The Scrum:

In Principle: The purpose of a scrum is to restart play with a contest for possession after a minor infringement or stoppage.

It couldn't be any simpler. The scrum is not a means of milking cheap penalties, it's not an ultra-macho posturing competition between the front fives – it's a means of re-starting the game.

Up until some point (I have been unable to find-out exactly when) between the two World Wars, when a scrum was called, the protocol was basically, last men up were the first men down. There weren't specialist props. Indeed, up until the late 1920s, you didn't really need to have three men in the front row – the All Blacks got bye with two.

With no specialist props, or hookers, while the faces in each team remained constant, the positions they filled could vary from scrum to scrum. Even when specialisation began, players could still be selected in different positions. Indeed that weel-kent man of Gordonians, Bob Bruce, used to joke that in 1948 his Scotland career was: “First game – front row; second game – second row; third game – back row – dropped.”

So why don't we go back to the old Laws. The three players from each side closest to the point where a scrum is to take place, form the front row – the rest fill-in behind them. I bet you would finally see scrums formed, indeed completed, within the 30 seconds allowed in the Law book.

OK, it might be the death knell of the wee, fat prop, but, I am sure the greetin-faced hooker would survive and eventually, at the top level, every pack would consist of eight x six foot five or six clones. But, it just might cure one of the biggest curses in the game today – the ten minute scrum.

IT IS such a pity Ian McColl (pictured below) is no longer with us. Who he, you might ask? McColl was a member of the legendary Rangers' Iron Curtain defence of the late 1940s and early 1950s – the first squad to complete a domestic Scottish Treble. He later went on to become Scotland's International Team Manager, from 1961 until 1965. He also was, like many of the rugby internationalists of his day, a professional man - a chartered civil engineer by day, who trained for his sport at night.

Statistically, he is the most-successful of the many men to have held this impossible job, and what makes his record all the more illustrious is – he never got to pick the team. Back when he was Manager, selecting the actual side was considered too-important to be left to the Manager, no, that task went to the greater brains of the butchers, bakers and candle-stick makers who had clawed their way onto the SFA Selection Committee.

Now, of all the posts at HQ which the blazers battled over, getting onto the Selection Committee was the plum job, since it guaranteed you got an annual European holiday at the SFA's expense. And, you got trips to England over the season, to check-out the Anglo-Scottish talent, justifying this by occasionally, like an old-time variety conjourer, by pulling a rabbit from a hat – or capping some Scot, playing in England, who wasn't even a house-hold name in their own household.

I presume McColl could suggest players he would like to use, but, at the end of the day, he had to play the players the selectors gave him. He was perhaps fortunate in that, at that time, we had some terrific players: Dave Mackay, Jim Baxter, John White and Denis Law, to name just four. But, while it's one thing to have a talented squad, it's quite another to get them playing well together, yet somehow, McColl managed to get the best out of his squads.

If he was still around, perhaps he could help Gregor Townsend get the best out of Stuart Hogg and Finn Russell, who are our 21^st century rugby-playing equivalents of Law and Baxter.