Crouch! Bind! Set! WTF!
What did you do during all those scrums last Saturday? Bit of Christmas shopping perhaps? Tackle a couple of Sudokus? Read Finnegans Wake?
Famously – or maybe not that famously, let’s be fair about it – after the English writer Ezra Pound read an early instalment of James Joyce’s notoriously impenetrable follow-up to Ulysses, he sent the great author his thoughts in a letter in November 1926. “Nothing so far as I make out,” wrote Pound, “nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherisation.”
In plainer terms, Pound wasn’t a fan of the amount of pointless meandering and oblique faffing about in Finnegans Wake. To which we can only respond, just be thankful you didn’t have to sit through 16 Springbok scrums, Ezra lad. We had circumambient peripherisation up the wazoo at Lansdowne last weekend, so we did.
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Every once in a while, rugby scrums have a moment. South Africa’s magnificently bellicose destruction of the Irish pack last Saturday brought them into the mainstream for a few days. General sports fans can happily go months without giving a second thought to what happens when eight big galoots bend at the waist and bate headfirst into eight other big galoots. But this was one of those times when everyone was still talking about them well into the following week.
Here’s the problem. Most people watching didn’t know what they were watching. All they saw, repeatedly, was the Springbok scrum going forwards, the Ireland scrum getting minced and the referee’s arm going out for a penalty to South Africa. The visitors had the put-in for 16 scrums in the game, four of which were resets. Of the other 12, only two (two!!) didn’t result in Matthew Carley calling a penalty against Ireland.
Now, you can say all the penalties were entirely justified and very few people are going to argue. As John O’Sullivan pointed out on the Counter Ruck podcast, Ireland should probably have seen another yellow card when the penalty try was given. You rarely see one without the other and if Carley decided to give Ireland a pass on the basis that they were already down to 12 men, South Africa can feel rightly aggrieved.
But let’s say you were watching that game without commentary and someone asked you to referee the scrums. How many of those penalties would you have called? More than 10? Fewer? How many yellow cards would you have handed out? How much guessing would you have had to do? How much guessing was Matthew Carley doing?
Saturday Shambles wraps up Ireland's November window
Scrums are the Finnegans Wake of sport. Almost nobody understands what’s going on. There are typically two distinct reactions – you either throw your hands in the air and say you haven’t a clue or you spoof it out and see if you can make the rest of us feel dumb enough to stop asking questions. Neither approach adds much to the general well of understanding.
This does rugby no good, needless to say. It’s bad enough that last week’s game took almost two-and-a-quarter hours to play the 80 minutes. But when so much of the dead time is taken up with a part of the game that isn’t being properly explained to the general public, rugby can’t be surprised when said public decides to do something else with its time.
As Andrew Porter walked to the sinbin last week, Carley shooed away Caelan Doris’s protests by saying, “Four scrums in a row. Four scrums in a row. From the outside, collapsed it to the floor.” And as he walked off, both Donal Lenihan and Bernard Jackman on commentary were in full agreement that Porter had to go. “This isn’t a Matthew Carley fault,” Jackman said. “This is a pack that are absolutely dominant and Andrew Porter has suffered the consequences.”
See, this is the part where the scrum stuff turns into honours maths for the rest of us. Andrew Porter has been a professional rugby player for almost a decade. He has played nearly 250 games for Leinster, Ireland and the Lions. He was being penalised at every scrum and was being warned by the referee that he was on borrowed time. So surely it makes no logical sense that he would do anything to infringe at the next scrum.
All sports are a dance around discipline. All sportspeople push to the edge of what they can get away with before backing off when the heat comes on. Almost no sportspeople get the benefit of what rugby players have, ie an on-field referee who is speaking to them the whole time about their transgressions and coaching them in real time on how to avoid his whistle.
So taking all of that into account, why would Andrew Porter deliberately collapse the next scrum when he knew he was so close to a sinbinning? The answer, by all accounts, is that he didn’t do it deliberately.
He did it because the superior power and technique of the Springbok scrum forced him to. But if that’s the case, isn’t he being made to leave the field not because of cynical or dangerous play but rather because he’s just not as good at it as the opposition? Or, to broaden it out, because the Irish pack aren’t as good at scrummaging as the South Africans? How does that encourage fair play?
Moreover, why isn’t rugby as a sport doing more to enlighten the people who are watching on in confusion? Where are the overhead cameras hovering above every scrum, showing the body positions and alignments? Where are the commentary-box referees that are so effective in the NFL, another frequently indecipherable sport? It all feels a bit hard on the brain.
Maybe that’s the point though. Maybe there’s a strain of thinking in rugby – it has laws rather than rules, don’t you know – that it’s the responsibility of the casual viewer to get up to speed if they want to enjoy it, rather than the duty of the sport to explain itself to make people feel included.
It does itself a disservice if that’s the case.
