PAUL REES WONDERS WHETHER SOME OF WORLD RUGBY’S LAW TWEAKS WILL MEAN THE END OF THE SCRUM AS WE KNOW IT
A BANE or a boon? The scrum is one of rugby union’s defining features, but is it slowly but surely being sacrificed on the altar of commercialism?
The cursed resets on the field in most of the professional era have led to resets of the law, the latest of which is a proposal that has divided opinion.
Earlier this month, World Rugby announced a number of law tweaks that it will be testing out. They include removing the option of another scrum if a team is awarded a free-kick at the set-piece. The intention is to reduce the amount of time taken over scrums which, although far fewer in number than in the amateur era, seem to eat up many more minutes.
Where the front rows, and then the five forwards behind them, tended to quickly come together when a scrum was awarded and get on with it, referees now bark out a time-consuming series of phased instructions. Repeat perfor mances after a collapse can mean it takes a couple of minutes before a scrum is completed, often with a penalty being awarded.
It is not quite as bad as the old days. Up to 1875, scrums tended to go on and on and were the centrepiece of a match. It was a long time before the 3-4-1 pack formation was established in South Africa (1906) and the first forwards who arrived after a tackle, when the holder of the ball would shout ‘down’ (a term that passed into American football), would line up at the front. They would all stand because putting one’s head down was seen as an act of cowardice.
“A scrum would last, if skilfully manoeuvred (as we then thought) 10 minutes or more, sometimes swaying this way, sometimes that,” said Charles Gurdon, a Richmond and England forward in the 1870s. “On special occasions, when one side was much heavier than the other, this rotund mass would gravitate, safely and unbroken, some 30 or 40 yards towards the goal line of the weaker side, leaving a dark muddy track to mark its course.”
There tended to be 10 forwards then. A scrum provided a means of dribbling the ball at a time when passing was as rare as a drop goal now, but by the 1870s the scrum was increasingly seen as lasting far too long. In time, forwards started to put their heads down to see where the ball was, ready to break early and dribble downfield in space, which prompted teams to take a player out of the pack and reinforce the backline. Gradually, half-backs came into their own and the game evolved rapidly from the end of the century.
The scrum was cited as a reason, although not as significant as broken time, for rugby’s split into two codes in 1895: the debate over how the game should be played was every bit as fierce as the issue of whether players sh
