KEY POINTS:
If the Poms had been asked a few years back to predict the winner in a scrummaging contest between the All Blacks and a wet paper bag, they would have had to think about their answer.
The French, on the other hand, would have replied immediately in favour
of the wet paper bag. The galling truth for New Zealanders was that, once Sean Fitzpatrick, Olo Brown and Craig Dowd had moved on, no one was scared of the All Black scrum.
It was a point duly acknowledged by Graham Henry when he was appointed All Black coach in December, 2003. "We have to get back to the scrum being a contest rather than a mechanism to restart the game," he said the day after he took the job.
"There's a huge forward contest in European club rugby and we don't get the same in Super 12. I think that is wrong and we need to change that. We have to put a lot of time into our ability to be stable and accurate at set pieces to set a platform for the talent."
It would be interesting, almost three years after Henry made that statement, to ask the English and French whether they would still back the wet paper bag. The answer would most likely be an emphatic no.
Last year England destroyed the Wallaby scrum at Twickenham but a week later couldn't get any change out of the All Blacks. The mighty Andy Sheridan buckled both Al Baxter and Matt Dunning but only just held on against Carl Hayman before having to raise the white flag with 15 minutes to go.
As for the French, they resorted to granny scrums last time they met the All Blacks.
The expectation is that the next three weeks will provide further evidence of the All Black scrummaging revival. It's a revival built on three foundation stones.
The change in philosophy was the first driver.
The fact Henry specifically targeted improvement was significant. Previous regimes had focused on building high-tempo game-plans where the ball was pushed wide. The emphasis was on mobile, athletic forwards who could support the expansive intentions.
Under Henry though, the criteria shifted so that the number one job of the front five was to secure set-piece possession. Mobility and athleticism were secondary.
With the goal of re-establishing the authority of the All Black scrum, the door was re-opened to players such as Hayman, Tony Woodcock and Anton Oliver. These were players who all fancied the confrontation. All three had also been discarded by Henry's predecessor, John Mitchell, and had a hunger to prove they were capable of adding a destructive element to the All Black scrum.
While the change in emphasis and the consequent shift in selection criteria were important, the biggest factor driving the scrummaging improvement was the appointment of Mike Cron as a specialist coach.
Cron had been a prop of reasonable ability and had coached club sides in Canterbury, always with a major interest in scrummaging. He travelled with the All Blacks to Italy, Wales and France in 2004 and was then hired full-time shortly after he returned from Europe.
By July, 2005, the improvements in the All Black scrum were hard to believe. The pack had been shunting 1200kg at the World Cup in 2003. Before they played the Lions, they were shunting 2000kg.
When they went to the UK later that year Wales, Ireland and Scotland and, to a lesser extent England, were given a hard time.
This year, the Wallabies were pummelled in Christchurch while even the Springboks would admit they now rate parity as a serious achievement.
Before the second Lions test last year, Cron put the improvement down to improved understanding of how the scrum works and improved training methods. "What you are looking for is an edge," he said. "For my edge, it is understanding body awareness. I use a bio-mechanist, a wrestling coach and I liaise with the strength and conditioning coach.
"We have gone away from hitting scrum machines as a scrum training session. I do a lot of work one-on-one with body awareness drills that help them scrum. We are all roughly the same weight so we have to learn to push better, to co-ordinate better.
"I was allocated a lot of time before we went to Europe [in 2004]. From that, the boys are really getting their heads around it.
"About 62 per cent of the power comes from the back five yet we all think it is the front row. But we must have them all correctly aligning their spines to transfer the power through."
There is no debate now - the paper bag wouldn't stand a chance.
- HERALD ON SUNDAY
