The opening weekend of the Premiership season contained the unusual sight of scrum-halves putting the ball in straight into the scrum, at least in a relative sense, and hookers striking for the ball, at least the ones whose side had the feed.
The double-header at Twickenham had pretty much the same number of resets, penalties and free-kicks as the previous few seasons. The set-piece was high in number because handling errors abounded and there were occasions in the match between Wasps and Harlequins when a couple of minutes were wasted as three resets were needed before the ball was put in.
It is too early to tell, even with the Rugby Championship as evidence, whether the change in the engagement process, and with it the reduced impact of the hit, will make a profound difference. It has given loosehead props on the side not putting in a licence to put pressure on tightheads whose hooker now has his focus otherwise engaged by having to hook for the ball.
There has been no suggestion that the hooker of the defending side will be encouraged to strike for the ball. The emphasis is on an eight-man shove against the seven of the opposition but, as the paramount reason for the change given by the International Rugby Board was player welfare, it is not what was envisaged.
A misconception is that a messy scrum is a recent blight on the game, but it was also so in days gone by. In the early 1980s, when there were more scrums than there are today, there was concern at the growing number of collapses. In a match between Cardiff and Bridgend at the Arms Park in 1981, the international referee Clive Norling was so exasperated at the front rows going to ground that he sent off two props, Ian Eidman and Ian Stephens.
A difference then was that it took nowhere near the time for the referee to set a scrum as it does now, but Norling's action at least highlighted the problem, not that much was done about it until concerns about safety started to dominate thinking.
Some coaches, led by the Leicester director of rugby, Richard Cockerill, are sceptical about whether the change will make any difference. Others, including the Wasps director of rugby, David Young, like Cockerill an international front-row forward, is more sanguine, far from averse to a return to a technical approach to scrummaging.
A reason the scrum had become a problem, at least in Test matches involving Tier One nations and encounters involving leading clubs, was that it was all about the hit. A dominant scrum was based not on a front row outmanoeuvring opponents, but on getting the hit and driving home the advantage.
It meant, as in the opening two Tests of the Lions series in Australia, that penalties tended to come in batches to one side. It was only in the final encounter, when Romain Poite refused to connive at Australia's attempts to camouflage an underlying weakness in the front row, that one side was seen as plainly dominant.
"The main thing the change does is reward the most technically efficient scrum," said the Newcastle scrummaging coach, Micky Ward, who has not stopped playing and packs down on the tighthead for Blaydon, in an interview with the Journal this week. "If you get yourself into the best position quickly you are going to benefit.
"Gone are the days of hitting the scrum in a poor position and relying on your weight to get you through. You have got to be really technically effective, and it is a positive development for the sport. It means teams are unable to virtually guarantee their own ball, as they could do previously. I think people want to see the contest evened out a bit and the new laws certainly do that, bringing it back to a more technical battle."
Ward, who admitted that some of Newcastle's front-rowers do not share his view of the new engagement process, said that props would now have to be more than big lumps. If hookers had forgotten how to hook so props, he felt, were no longer au fait with the art of scrummaging.
"I have been watching a lot of the early games under the new laws, and already you can see certain trends emerging," he said. Putting the ball in straight and hooking were two. "Props have got to be able to actually scrummage properly. For the past two or three years some people have been able to get away with it, but they won't do any more."
The scrum should be a means of restarting play, not a reason to stop it, but ever since defenders were required to stand five metres back, it has become blunt as an attacking weapon. That has worked to the detriment of the game because, with lineouts often shortened, the scrum gives a rare opportunity for three-quarters to take on their opposite numbers rather than a defensive line strung out rugby league-style.
That is one reason why the change needs to have a meaningful impact. It will add to the attacking side of the game, but as the Harlequins No8 Nick Easter observed before the start of the season, defensive thinking has become prevalent in the modern era.
Norling did not start a trend when he sent off Stephens and Eidman 32 years ago, which was more the pity. Only if referees are encouraged to have a low tolerance threshold when it comes to offences at the scrum is there likely to be an appreciable difference.
Heineken Cup troubles continue
If the intention of the leading clubs in France and England, on the eve of a European Rugby Cup Ltd meeting in Dublin, was to throw cold water into the faces of the Celtic unions and Italy by announcing they had signed an entente cordiale in preparing for life after the Heineken Cup, it worked.
After four months of no talks about the future of the Heineken Cup, the ERC board talked about holding more talks. What is needed is torque, and plenty of it, otherwise European rugby's premier club tournament will disappear.
An Anglo-French Cup, or whatever it would be called, would be a shadow of a substitute, as the clubs acknowledged by inviting teams from Wales, Ireland, Scotland and Italy to join them. About the only thing that was resolved in Dublin was the adamant opposition of the four RaboDirect unions to their teams joining a new tournament.
That stance summed up the reason why the talks have got nowhere: four unions against two groups of clubs with the Rugby Football Union and the French Rugby Federation, who receive no income from ERC, maintaining a neutral stance while hoping their adolescent offspring mature.
Negotiations have so far got nowhere because positions on both sides have been entrenched, but what should be clear to the RaboDirect Pro 12 unions is that if the Heineken Cup is to last for at least the rest of the decade, a new agreement will have to be significantly different from the current one.
Whatever the outcome, the Celts and Italy will be worse off relatively. The Heineken Cup will not survive until the English and French clubs feel there is a more equitable split of the profits, between three leagues more than six countries, and if it falls the Pro 12 sides will lose 25% of their income.
The English and French clubs, businesses after all, would have been negligent had they not made an alternative arrangement and for the board of ERC to express its surprise at the timing of the move would, to some, show more stupidity than they had been credited with.
It is interesting that the Welsh Rugby Union has called for a mediator to help resolve the impasse, a route it pulled out of going down this year when it was in dispute with its four regions, but it is hard to see either side being bound by the decision of an outsider.
While the concern of the strength of the game in Europe is a concern for unions rather than clubs, if any fall-out from the Heineken Cup impacts on the Six Nations by markedly weakening teams in it, a chill wind will blow the way of LNR and Premiership Rugby. A contracting game would be bad for business.
Brian O'Driscoll's calender is marked
Wales's visit to Ireland in the second round of the Six Nations in February promises to make for a spicy weekend as the fall-out from Warren Gatland's decision to drop Brian O'Driscoll from the deciding Test between the Lions and Australia in July shows no sign of settling.
Gatland, when he was Ireland coach back in 1999, awarded probably the outstanding outside-centre in the professional era his first cap, but omitted O'Driscoll from the Sydney Test after Jamie Roberts's return to fitness.
O'Driscoll's response was dignified at the time but in an interview this month he admitted he resents Gatland and added that it was unlikely he would be sending the Wales head coach a Christmas card.
The former Ireland hooker Shane Byrne joined the debate this week when he maintained that the decision to drop O'Driscoll had nothing to do with rugby. "All the attention would have been on Brian had they [the Lions] won and I don't think Warren wanted that," he said.
Apart from the suspicion that O'Driscoll would not have played in the first Test had Roberts been fit, given Jonathan Davies's form, Byrne's comment transcends disappointment and is gratuitously insulting.
Wales have won two grand slams under Gatland and on each occasion he stood back from the celebrations, saying they were for the players, not him. After nearly 20 years in British and Irish rugby, there should be few who have not worked out that what motivates the New Zealander is winning. Attention has nothing to do with it.
It was not only rugby followers in Ireland who would have scripted the end of O'Driscoll's Lions career differently, and not just out of sentiment, but it was a rugby decision, one vindicated by the performance of the Lions in the third Test. Like it or not, Gatland made probably the toughest call of his coaching career and got it right.
And it will fill O'Driscoll with new year resolution come Wales's visit to the Aviva Stadium in February.
More replays for referees
Referees will have a greater say in the video referral process after the IRB gave them authority to review any incident they want to on the big screen at grounds. Previously, a referee had been able only to use the screen to review acts of foul play but now has the power to use it under the same protocol as the TV match official.
There will still be a TMO to review passages of play that need repeated showings and the change, which was agreed last week, takes effect immediately.
How long will it be before rugby union goes down the route of American football and sees referees donning a pair of cans and looking at replays through a camera on the touchline?
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