The rolling maul has been a prominent feature of Super Rugby Pacific. Photo / Getty
The rolling maul has been a prominent feature of Super Rugby Pacific. Photo / Getty
OPINION:
Covid mangling Super Rugby is probably the main reason live television audiences have significantly decreased from pre-Covid figures.
But boredom with the rolling maul, the least entertaining way to score a try, has to be a factor in viewing malaise as well. The nadir was probably reached on Tuesdayin Wellington, when six of the 10 tries in the Hurricanes' 53-12 defeat of Moana Pasifika came from rolling mauls.
The problem is mauls off lineouts work so well.
"The maul's definitely more prominent now, because it's so hard to stop," explains All Blacks 2003 World Cup captain and former Canterbury coach Reuben Thorne.
"You essentially have to defend it with at least two players less than what the opposition has in there. You generally can only defend with six, because you need one guy free on the blindside, and one on the openside. If they bury their heads it's easy for a halfback to run round and score.
"Practising mauls, which the Crusaders spend a lot of time on, is actually bloody hard work. You have to essentially do it as intensely as you would in a game, at full speed against live opposition."
Reuben Thorne co-coached Canterbury last season. Photo / Photosport
Once a maul is moving there will be instructions yelled, usually from the jumper, or from the halfback.
But 132-test All Black hooker Keven Mealamu says instinct plays a role too. Running from the back (where you usually find hookers carrying the ball in a maul) was, he says, spontaneous.
"Let's say you feel a bit of momentum on the left side. For me it was that feeling, that on one side we're getting dominance, having a little peek to see if anyone's there, and then going."
What has changed over time with the maul is that it's become more difficult to legally halt.
In the 1990s a Waikato team coached by Glenn Ross weren't the first to use a rolling maul, but they were certainly the most effective.
All Black Graham Purvis was a prop in a terrific Waikato pack of the early 1990s where powerful, hard-edged men like Richard Loe, Warren Gatland, Buck Anderson, John Mitchell and Purvis were born to wrestle the ball upfield.
The rules then were even more weighted towards relying on mauling.
"You could pick up the ball in a ruck and basically turn it into a maul," says Purvis. "The other different rule then was that if a maul collapsed or stopped, after you'd been going forward, the scrum feed would be given to the team going forward."
Now you can't pick up the ball in a ruck, and if the maul is halted the ball is handed over to the defending team.
By the time Corey Flynn was an All Black in the 2000s no hands in the ruck were allowed, and the handover rules were in place, but then came another rule change making it harder to stop a maul.
"We used to be able to lift legs in a maul, which would take someone off balance. Now you can't do that. If a maul's done right it's very hard to stop. Harder now than 10 years ago," claims Flynn.
So how can a maul be stopped?
The riskiest way is for the defending team to compete for the ball in the lineout. Sam Whitelock did that for the Crusaders three minutes from the end of the 2017 Super final against the Lions in Johannesburg, with the Lions on a roll, and won the lineout on their throw.
When I talked to Whitelock's coach Scott Robertson weeks later he was still slightly amazed at Whitelock "having the balls to go, 'righto, we're going to get up, and if we miss they'll probably score'."
The second biggest risk is to sack the attacking team's lineout jumper as comes back to the ground. You can be penalised if your timing is just a second or two off, or, if you miss the tackle, the attacking side will roll over you.
For Thorne the favoured answer is "to get lower than them with your body position and hit them and try to drive them back and disrupt them before they have momentum."
The harsh reality is that the odds in a maul are stacked in favour of the team with the ball because what's happening is the only time in rugby when players can legally obstruct would-be tacklers.
What should change? World Rugby should allow a defender to wrestle a maul to the ground, and if the ball isn't freed it's handed to the defending team for a scrum.
Will that happen? Almost certainly not, as the best maulers in test rugby are teams from the Six Nations, and South Africa.
Like it or not, the game is caught in a mauling trap.
