I can tell you know that the way the game of rugby is changing is making it worse. As a front row player there was nothing I enjoyed more that a good scrum, the act of over 500kg of body mass clashing together in a battle of power and strength. The scrum is a way to determine to power a team has and can often decide who wins or loses on game day. When the ref blew the whistle I would look straight at him and I would look for the hand gesture for a scrum down, the elbows bent, fingertips touching followed by the arm to signal what team had the scrum. For me this hand signal was the equivalent to a matador’s red flag and I was the bull. The way the scrum use to work was that you would all form up and squeeze all 8 bodies as tight as you can and you would be facing your opponent, on the command “crouch” everyone would squat down and the second row gets up on their feet. This was go time, the ref would give the command “touch” this told the props to touch each other where they plan on binding with the hands but props often took this command as a cue to punch the opposing prop, then comes the command “pause” this was the orange lighting sequence in a drag race, you are about to slam to accelerator and smash into your opponent. The best thing about the pause command is that the ref decided how long the pause would be so you would just be staring at your opposing prop trying to drill fear into him. The next and final command was “engage” this was the green light, this was signal to clash bodies and push for your life, there would be grunts from players as their bodies hit and sometimes the chant of “2, 3. push”.
Now this method was put under investigation a couple of years ago and it was deemed “too dangerous to the sport”, which is complete rubbish because rugby is one of the most physical sports, almost everything in rugby involves players running into other players at full speed. The reason why this method of scrummaging was deemed too dangerous is because of the risk of injury, some science boffin that has probably never played the game has said that when the players clash together there is not enough time to set right so the scrum could collapse. This is funny because there is always the chance the scrum could collapse you can not prevent it. The IRB then changed how the scrum is set up in an effort to make the game safer so at all levels the scrum commands have changed.
The new, and by new I really mean rubbish way of scrummaging has ruined the excitement for me, I mean I still do like a good scrum because it’s still that mass of bodies competing for the ball, but now I can not enjoy it as much as I used to. The way the scrum works now is that the two teams form together like before, squeezing every last bit of air between the 8 men, then the same “crouch” command is given but this time instead of the “touch(punch)” command we are given a “bind” command. This command tells the props to bind on to each other securely and then the ref checks the bindings. The only good thing about this is that you can then use your hand to put the prop in a bad position to push, like pushing their shoulder down which puts you at an advantage. We then get the “set” command which is the one I hate the most, this command tells the two packs to come together and set up ready to push but we can not push yet. The ref then will tell the scrum half to put the ball in and once it is in we can push. Often scrums are reset twice because of an early push which shows this is not a good way of scrummaging. So if the RFU/IRB is reading this then please change it back to the good ol’ way.
React!