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Scrum gamesmanship not a great look for rugby, Craig Dowd says
Craig Dowd
April 26, 2016
© Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

I've spent the weekend thinking about that scrum situation at the end of the Hurricanes vs. Chiefs game in Wellington on Saturday and I can't work out whether Dave Rennie is a hero or a villain.

It was a great game with some end-to-end attacking play and some great tries to top it off. The local derbies are always the best ones to watch. But what a finish!

The Chiefs scrum was under the pump the whole game. There was one scrum when the referee gave it to the Chiefs and there was a look of disbelief among Hurricanes front-rowers Dane Coles, Jeff Toomaga-Allan and Reggie Goodes.

Clearly they had the edge but the referee penalised them for boring in. The Chiefs were back-pedalling; the locks were high; they'd lost their footing. But that's another topic.

It looked almost certain that a penalty would have come from that scrum and that would have been the game. But to pull off your front-rowers and play to the letter of the law; you would have to say that the Chiefs management had control of the outcome of the game.

That's not to say that the Hurricanes didn't have the chance to win it; if Jason Woodward catches the ball the hosts are the winners. But it opens up the debate about how far coaches can go and how much involvement they can have.

© Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

Will those injured props be out training this week and available for next weekend? I could almost guarantee they will be.

It is a bit of a grey area and leaves itself open to underhanded tactics.

Let's be honest here, everyone knew what was going on. The gentlemanly aspect of it was taken away.

I have to admit I've got a foot in each camp. If I was in that situation I would have done probably exactly the same thing as Dave Rennie; but from the Hurricanes and Chris Boyd's perspective, you would think that was one in the face.

It did control the outcome of the game.

© Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

While the Hurricanes did have that later chance to score, if they had been awarded a penalty at the scrum and kicked the goal they would have gone back to halfway and the game would have been completely different.

From a scrummaging perspective, if you do have a dominant scrum then that is an advantage; but these days you don't have to have a dominant scrum to win games.

In seasons, years and decades gone by, if you had a very, very good scrum you were well on the way to winning a game because you could actually intimidate the opposition forward pack.

But now you can pull out the Golden Oldies tactic and it just changes the game completely. My immediate reaction when watching it was to think: 'If that's the tactic we're going to play why don't we just get rid of scrums?'

Scrums have become farcical in the last 10 years; so much of it today is about referees' interpretations.

There are some clips doing the rounds on YouTube of Sona Taumalolo and John Schwalgar going at it in an ITM scrum as a reminder of what scrums should look like and it just highlights the combativeness of the set-piece and how scrums should be. It's about guys going into battle.

© Stefan Postles/Getty Images

But now, the scrum is about building a structure, making it look pretty and the referee has got a multitude of infringements he can award a penalty for. It can be a lottery and half the time when there are offences or the scrum goes down if the ball is at the back, or the ref's had a gutful, it is just play on. It is a bit of a dog's breakfast.

While I make the comment about getting rid of scrums, if they were to disappear from the game it would make it more like league. It would take away something of the true essence of the game's origins with all that pushing and shoving back in Webb Ellis' day. There are so few scrums in some matches now that the game is in danger of losing something and mutating into something else.

But I don't see where change can come from.

Meanwhile, the Crusaders demonstrated all the qualities mentioned in last week's column.

Sadly, the Brumbies didn't look up to it. They dropped passes, made mistakes and the two sides looked like they were from different ends of the spectrum. And so poorly did the Brumbies play that they weren't even able to drag the Crusaders down to their level.

That's the key for the Crusaders - they set a standard and they keep playing to it. Some of their players look really slick, they can move the ball and they can play a high-paced game or bring in a heavy hitter like Nemani Nadolo - who has since been suspended - to smash his way through; some of their tries were pretty special.

© Craig Dowd

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