Talking Rugby: I fear cheating will be rife at the World Cup

The scrum is an unfair contest

The Rugby World Cup which starts in New Zealand this Friday may bring us many things.

We can anticipate better rugby compared to the type we saw in both 2003 and 2007 when kicking dominated the game. There may be some stirring contests such as New Zealand v France and Australia v Ireland in the pool matches alone. South Africa’s pool games against Wales, Samoa and Fiji should all be fascinating and physically frightening.

But I fear one thing we can forget about seeing is a fair contest for the ball at the set scrums. Cheating, it would appear, has been quietly but officially sanctioned by referees when it comes to the scrum feed.

I have watched carefully most of the August warm-up internationals in both hemispheres and on the evidence to date I can tell you, there is only bad news. Referees look completely disinterested in administering the laws when it comes to feeding the scrum.

They may be red hot on players killing the ball or slowing down the opposition supply at the breakdown. They are fiercely determined to blow offside players not retreating at a kick ahead.

But putting the ball in straight to a set scrum? Forget it. Whether they have been told quietly to ignore the crooked feeds or they’re just too busy watching for players collapsing scrums, I don’t know.

But whatever the reason, just about every referee in action this past month has consistently turned a blind eye to half-backs stuffing the ball in among their own forwards’ feet.

At best, the ball is shoved into the second row but in some cases it appears to go straight into the back row. Presumably in the interests of a quick game and rapid release of the ball from the set phase, referees are waving play on, completely disregarding the laws of the game.

Yet it is as absurd as forming up a line-out and the thrower chucking the ball in down his own side, so that the opposition has no chance of reaching it. In modern day rugby, referees rule on this aspect; they order a scrum with the put-in given to the opposition.

So they are administering that part of the game. But when it comes to the actual scrum, they just close their eyes to the crooked feed. Why? Don’t ask me. It is completely bizarre that one aspect of the game, the throw into the line-out, is strictly policed. But the feed into the scrum is largely ignored.

This has been a blight on the sport for years. I can remember covering the first ever World Cup final, between New Zealand and France, in Auckland in 1987, and watching the late Australian referee Kerry Fitzgerald turning a blind eye to crooked and therefore illegal scrum feeding. It went on throughout that final and I castigated the Australian for it at the time.

But here we are, 24 years later, and it seems certain to go on again in this World Cup.

As to exactly why match officials or the IRB have decided to ignore one of the clearly stated rules in their own law book, I just do not know. But it makes the scrums a joke. They are supposed to be a true contest yet how can they be when one side is 100 per cent guaranteed to win the ball?

If no-one is bothered about this, it would be better for the game as a whole to abandon the entire scrum time wasting saga and just tap the ball and go, as happens in rugby league.

The authorities obviously don’t want a fair contest so what is the point of scrums in that case?

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