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Wayne Smith From: The Australian February 12, 2011 12:00AM
THE pregnant pause in the scrum engagement process might soon be terminated if the International Rugby Board can find a way to safely do away with it.
Since 2007, the four-stage "crouch-touch-pause-engage" process has become a distinguishing characteristic of rugby but there is a growing belief in the game that the pause, far from steadying the two opposing packs before engagement, is actually causing problems, particularly since the length of the pause varies from referee to referee.
Yet while there might be some merit in speeding up the process, the IRB's scrum project group is hastening slowly.
According to SANZAR referees boss Lyndon Bray, no serious spinal injuries have occurred in the southern hemisphere competition since the four-stage process was introduced in 2007, and with safety the primary consideration, no changes will be made until the authorities are convinced the risk to players has not been increased.
But the Wallabies will be hoping some way can be found to eliminate the pause, even if no changes will be made until after the World Cup in September-October.
Although they were up against an arguably superior New Zealand scrum in the Bledisloe Test in Hong Kong last year, the Wallabies clearly were thrown by Irish referee Alain Rolland's elongated "pause" before each engagement.
Part of the price of being seen to have a weak set piece is that any time a referee is unsure which pack jumped the gun on an engagement, it is more likely to be the Wallabies who concede the free-kick or penalty. So anything that can streamline the process should be to Australia's advantage.
It's swimming, curiously enough, that has provided the impetus for the IRB to at least look at the process. Before swimming adopted the one-start-only rule, swimmers would break deliberately, either trying to anticipate the gun or simply in an attempt to psyche out their opponents. As a result, the sport was almost impossible to televise because finals sessions dragged on.
Then officials got tough and disqualified anyone who left the blocks or else waited for them to finish the race and then gave them the dreaded news. Suddenly the whole mess was cleaned up. In similar vein, former All Blacks coach Laurie Mains threatened New Zealand props in the year before the 1995 World Cup that anyone deliberately collapsing scrums would not be considered for selection. Curiously, scrums in the NPC and Test matches that year worked a treat.
Urban legend has it that an exasperated Robbie Deans issued a similar threat to one Australian serial offender. Unfortunately it didn't have the same effect. Old habits, it seem, die hard. By the same token, that offender never played for the Wallabies again.
The end goal, according to Bray, is to get safe scrums where both sides have the ability to win the hit, or at very least absorb it. Reflect, for a moment, on how the whole crouch-touch-pause-engage shenanigans began in the first place and it was to stop the old process of tightheads leading the engagement to catch the opposition off-balance. Nothing is more likely to end in tragedy than 1800kg of prime rugby beef colliding when one prop is not ready.
The safety issue, however, has given way to a timing issue. It's unrealistic to expect two 900kg packs to teeter for any length of time on the brink of engagement without one of the 16 forwards involved surrendering to the urge to push.
Which brings us back to the referees and the fact that they are providing all the verbal cues. England scrum coach Graham Rowntree made a common sense suggestion last November when he said the IRB should sit all of its top referees down with a speech therapist and have them repeat the four-word mantra until they had their cadences synchronised.
Bray did reveal that in New Zealand he had brought in a speech therapist to analyse each referee's cadence on match footage but that was after the event. And that wouldn't work. It doesn't matter if the referees are saying it wrong. What matters is that they all say it identically.
Bray revealed that referees will be keeping an eagle eye out this season for No 3s not packing straight. You can almost hear young Wallabies prop James Slipper yelling "Hallelujah!" after all the nonsense he had to put up with as Martin Castrogiovanni constantly bored in at an angle in the Italy Test with Australia, all the while getting penalised when the scrum inevitably collapsed.
Bray's referees are well aware who the most boring tightheads are but they won't allow any prejudices formed last season to affect how they handle them at the start of this year's Super Rugby. That said, Bray will provide all teams with what he termed "robust feedback" from the early rounds.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...-1226004680417
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