Matt Williams' Stupidity Finally Explained

I SEE MATT “The Stupidest Man in Rugby” Williams has been pontificating again. Following the Springboks' demolition of the Irish scrum in Dublin at the weekend, the greatest thinker since Homer Simpson has decided – the scrum needs to be “depowered”. Significantly, in researching this piece, I was unable to discover what position Williams played during his playing career, indeed, one database I checked out said simply: “he was never a rugby player”.

OK, that explains a lot, and he was never much of a coach either. You take the scrum out of the game and you don't have much of a game left. The scrum is one of the key components of Rugby Union. It doesn't need to be de-powered, what it does require, however, is, as a minimum, to be refereed properly. In addition, I would take the penalty out of the scrum, other than for serious foul play – that would greatly help the game.

As we journalists are becoming fed-up explaining: the scrum is in there to re-start the game after a break-down in play in which no penalty has been incured. The basic notion is, if you have a scrum, you effectively take the 16 forwards out of the game and create space for the 14 backs to do their thing.

The scrum is simply that, a means of restarting play, not a means of generating penalties. So, if World Rugby was to suddenly find a collective brain and do two things, a lot of the problems around the scrum would be solved. These two things are:

1. Go back to insisting the ball is put down the centre of the tunnel, and bring back hooking – the days of scrum halves feeding almost into the second row have to stop.

2. Again, apart from instances of serious foul play, do away with scrum penalties, make scrum offences punishable by a free kick; thus, the non-offending side could either kick to touch, where they would lose possession, or take a tap free kick, where they would then need to manufacture a line break.

Dominant scrummaging would still be rewarded, by the return of the strike against the head, while a lot of the nonsense of the “dark arts” being invoked to help an inferior scrum, would be done away with.

There is another innovation I would bring in for elite-level Rugby, where most of the ugly scrums take place, that is:

• Set the “Spider Cams” which can be seen at all the big games, directly above the two hookers' heads at each scrum – then the TMO could see when or if the props were pushing straight and advise the referee accordingly.

There is no need to de-power the scrum, simply tweak the Laws of the
Game and give clearer instructions to referees.

SPEAKING OF referees, I did love the two comments which I saw on Facebook, regarding Hollie Davidson's performance in Cardiff on Saturday. In the first former Welsh cap Mark Ring thought Hollie had had a poor game and was out of her depth. His criticism was immediately answered by commentator Myles Harrison, who felt Hollie had had an excellent performance. In this case, I'm with Myles – while Mark Ring was clearly speaing through his.

I also loved Nigel Owens' response to all the Bokke fans, who were howling for yellow cards for the Irish front row after the South Africans' scrum domination produced a Penalty Try. As Nigel pointed out, a yellow card could only be flashed after a Penalty Try, if the individual offender can be identified – such as the player who pulls down an advancing maul. In this case, since the entire Irish pack had been schooled, no yellow could be flashed.

Still on referees, I noticed some comments in the BTL section of The Offside Line regarding the absence of neutral touch judges for the big Under-18 Schools Cup semi-final between Merchiston Castle School and George Watson's College.

The thing is, neutral officials have to receive at least expenses and you cannot surely expect those poor under-funded and under-appreciated Public Schools to pay some pleb to come along and run up and down a touchline. Aye Right!!!

It reminds me of the black sheep of our school team – the one who finished playing and became a referee. I remember him telling me how poorly paid the Rugby referees were in comparison with their Footballing cousins. Even at grass-roots level, the fitba guys are much-better paid than our officials.

Perhaps the SRU and the other Unions should be addressing this problem as a matter of urgency, since there is clearly a shortage of officials in our game.

THE Tom Curry “tackle” on Juan Cruaz Mallia and its aftermath has sent Anglo-Argentinian relations to their lowest point since yon cross “played” Diego Maradona's hand and flew past Peter Shilton back in 1986.

Now, my view was, Curry's challenge was fractionally late and if anything merited no more than a penalty to the visitors, since the alleged confrontation with Felipe Contepomi happened in the tunnel and out of range of the match-day TV cameras, I cannot comment on it.

World Rugby has apparently asked for CCTV footage of the events in the tunnel, should these prove inconclusive or difficult to access – then, being Scottish, I have to say, Curry is guilty as alleged.

What I will say about Curry and some other English players – Earl, Pollock, occasionally Itoje, they do like to whoop and holler and celebrate even the award of a penalty – maybe time some referee had the cojones to reverse a decision against them: for behaviour against the spirit of the game.