Rugby: Dowd's message - set scrums free

Craig Dowd reveals some of the techniques of scrummaging during a North Harbour training session. Photo / Greg Bowker

Have you ever noticed that traffic jams can actually be beautiful?

Yes, if you are stuck in one, they are damned annoying, to put it mildly. But if you happen to be going the other way, they can inspire a sense of freedom.

Which is one way of avoiding an intro with the dreaded phrase "rugby scrum" in it.

After spending three hours working on opening paragraphs with "rugby scrum" in them, it has come to this.

The traffic jam scenario is what greeted the Herald team as we raced up the motorway towards Albany Stadium for a date with the former All Black prop Craig Dowd who was holding a wee forum about rugby scrums before a North Harbour team training.

Dowd is clearly a brave man. Putting your head into 60 tests worth of scrums might be understandable, but coaching North Harbour? The man has balls. (Just kidding, North Harbour.)

As for trying to explain what goes on in a scrum to a pack of journalists who had seen better days, none of which were spent in a frontrow: sheer courage.

But try he did, manfully, and I'm almost none the wiser, the operative word being almost because Dowd probably did teach us a thing or two.

Scrums are the reverse of traffic jams. They are great fun for the blokes in them, but a pain for everyone else.

They weren't always the tiresome, endless bores of today either. Roll the tapes and you'll find that in days not too long ago, they were more interesting arm wrestles compared to the carefully co-ordinated slam-bang contests that today are dragging themselves and the game down.

There are so many tactics and rules, so much referee-orchestrated timing involved, that endless re-sets are now inevitable.

Dowd explained a couple of things. The tighthead prop, the guy on the right-hand side who must stick his noggin between two opponents, will more likely take a scrum down if he's in trouble. The loosehead, on the left side, will more likely stand up.

I'll paraphrase Dowd here, and hope like heck that I'm not putting words in his mouth.

All that crouch, touch, pause, engage business which the referees must do to announce each scrum is a complete waste of time because whatever they use as a starting gun, the frontrows will try to get an advantage by jumping the gun.

The refs might as well yell "JerryCollinsIsASoftArse".

As for re-setting after a scrum has collapsed, Dowd suggests that the frontrowers be allowed to get on with their business. In other words, if blokes know they are going to get scrummed over if they go to ground, then they won't be so keen on going to ground anymore.

So let the scrum go on, he says. With the most dangerous injuries more likely to come on the first hit of a scrum, a beaten prop who is forced into the dirt and walked over is mainly getting his ego bruised.

But Dowd is not as despondent about scrums as some others.

"We have this discussion every year or two when there is a bad game ... I think it's only about 10 per cent of games that need tidying up and we're not too far away," he said, in reference to that horrible scrum display in the Wellington test last Saturday night.

And so, to a few interesting stats, supplied by one of Dowd's sidekicks.

The combined speed of the frontrows hitting each other is 50km/h which is a lot faster than what was happening on parts of the northern motorway that day.

The displaced weight of a top-class scrum as it flies through the air can be around 2000kg (or about 5kg in the case of the Australian scrum).

In other words, finding every reason under the sun to make scrums re-set makes playing rugby a damned exhausting and neck-busting business.

If it was down to me, this would be the scrum rule. The ref yells "JerryCollinsIsASoftArse", the frontrows come together, the halfback has one second to chuck the flippin ball in, and from there on it's a mighty free-for-all and who cares how or where the ball comes out so long as it does. And may the best men win.

The searching questions didn't stop there, Dowd to revealing that his most-valued frontrow asset was "a really big tighthead".

That's the sort of technical talk we like to hear.

However, those fondly remembered days of frontrow dark arts are well and truly gone, Dowd reckoned, such is the scrutiny on the frontrowers.

And let's be honest. We the public aren't exactly missing out on this score because under the rules of the Holy Masonic Frontrow Orders the blokes who dealt in these areas were not allowed to reveal any of their secrets or stories on pain of being ordered to play on the wing or worse still, locked in a small room with a soccer player for a day.

Dowdy question time over.

We're not all talk in the media however. No siree.

One of the journos immediately slammed his considerable bulk into Dowdy's scrum machine causing a couple of its screws to fall off.

With that, we roared back down the motorway (the traffic jam having dissipated), safe and sound after another rugby adventure.