Former Wallabies head coach Ewan McKenzie is concerned about the lack of scrum contests during the Rugby Championship.
McKenzie, a former front-row international, was annoyed by referees urging scrum-halves to ‘play on’ when the scrums had collapsed during the matches between the Springboks and Wallabies and Los Pumas and the All Blacks.
Over the opening two weekends of the Championship, six penalties have been awarded at scrum time, with South Africa and New Zealand claiming three apiece, while Australia and Argentina both had none.
No scrum contest
Speaking on the Rugby Unity podcast alongside fellow former Wallabies head coach Eddie Jones, McKenzie aired his dismay at the growing trend of officials, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere, ignoring infringements at the set-piece and their reluctance to reset the scrum.
“There was a scrum where Argentina went backwards, and then they collapsed it, and the referee just said, ‘Play the ball,’ so the All Blacks drove on their own put-in, drove Argentina backwards, so they’re looking for a penalty, obviously, that’s the norm, that’s how the European referees have officiated it. But no, they drive Argentina backwards; it collapses, it should have been a penalty, and you get nothing,” McKenzie began.
“There’s no reward for having a dominant scrum; you may as well start putting back rowers in the front row like they did in the schoolboy football 20 years ago. That’s what we are getting to because there’s no contest.
“In the other Test matches, it was the same thing; the scrum contest is just gone. There’s nothing in it. There was one penalty, that was it. Otherwise, everyone just gets the ball regardless of what goes on up front.”
Japan head coach Jones agreed with the former prop and pointed to a game involving his team where he believed that they weren’t rewarded for their scrum dominance, too.
He added that it is a growing trend in the game that has been pushed by World Rugby, who evaluate officials on the number of scrum resets that occur in a match that they oversee.
“We have been talking about the scrum for a while now, and there seems to be pressure in the game – and these things creep in, it starts as a small thing, and then it becomes a trend to referee like that and that then becomes the norm,” he explained.
“What we’re seeing becoming the norm at the moment, and again, it’s crept into the game, is taking the contest out of the scrum. I alluded to it way back when we [Japan] played Wales in the second Test that the referee was trying to take the contest out of the game because Japan is not supposed to have a stronger scrum.
“So they didn’t want to have that situation where they had to adjudicate in a difficult game for that referee at that time. So you’re seeing that more and more, and they definitely get marked on the number of resets they have, so they don’t want to have resets. They just get the play going again and get the ball away quickly.
“It’s the same with this deliberate knock on. That was never part of the game, until someone said, ‘Oh, we got a referee against that,’ and now it’s become the norm that a player sticks out their hand to try to take an intercept, and they get sin-binned, and it’s a deliberate knock on. Very, very few times it’s a deliberate knock on and you can see when it is, but these things become the norm and part of our game, and it detracts from the game.”
Eddie Jones’ claim
The approach to limit the number of resets and not reward scrum dominance is taking a weapon away from the Springboks, according to McKenzie.
“Well, it just detracts from the point of having different bodies, shapes and sizes,” he said.
“There are guys out there that look like they’re there to scrum and provide some sort of technical expertise in that area, but if the scrum is just allowed to tent peg… In the South Africa game, every time it just collapsed in, so there was no reward. South Africa got a penalty on the second shove, which they normally do in every game. They didn’t get on the first scrum because Smith didn’t trap the ball at the back of the scrum, and it fell out. But the second scrum, they got a penalty. So you go, ‘Oh, okay, maybe South Africa have got scrum dominance’ but every scrum just went down after that and they said play on. So you wouldn’t know who the dominant scrum was because the scrum never happened, the ball just went in and out, but there was no contest.”
McKenzie added that the approach from Northern Hemisphere referees differs from that of the Southern Hemisphere.
“It is rugby league-esque, and everyone will lose interest. They will just pick different body shapes up front. The problem is that you’re going to get a European referee, and a French referee is going to give a penalty if you go one foot forward. So you’re going to get a penalty for being dominant, that’s what’s going to happen. Suddenly, teams will get caught out because that’s how they referee. They reward the dominant scrum, and that’s why the Springboks have played to it; it’s been a strength of theirs for the last six or seven years,” he said.
“Every time on their first put in, they’ll do a second shove and try and milk a penalty is that they try to exert their dominance. Well, you’re not getting those opportunities anymore.”
‘I wouldn’t put it past Rassie Erasmus’ – The law Eddie Jones wants World Rugby to ‘remove’
Not the referees’ fault
Meanwhile, Jones explained that getting the referees all aligned is difficult, it is not impossible, and while the scrum is a unique feature to rugby union, it is not safe from the chopping block.
“It is difficult, but we do get that alignment sometimes and at the most recent World Cup, I think we had pretty good refereeing. I must make this clear, though, the problem is not the referees themselves – it’s the management of the referees and the management of the game,” the veteran coach added.
“If you go back to NRL 12 weeks ago, where they had a problem with the sin bin, where basically anyone who touched the head of a player got sin-binned… There was a huge outcry. What happened on Monday is that the CEO or the referees’ manager, and the chairman, all those guys got together and said, ‘We can’t have this in the game, we’ve got to get back to having a sensible approach,’ and they fixed it in 24 hours.
“It’s the same now if there’s a problem in the game, people got to say, ‘This is the problem’, and it can only be done by World Rugby, they’re the only ones who can control this they say, ‘Right how do we fix it, what’s best for the game?’. You say we can’t lose scums in the game, we’ve lost rucking. I’m not saying we should bring back rucking, but we’ve lost it, and the game can change and lose things.
“If this continues, we will lose scrum. But don’t say we can’t lose the scrum because it’ll just be a different game. ”
READ MORE: Will Skelton’s Rugby Championship fate decided as Wallabies won’t enforce World Rugby regulations