Scrum Again

I love the scrum; I love it so much I could easily watch eighty minutes of it. At international level, you can have great trys and I appreciate the deft skill of these flighty ball handlers. They work their way through defences; unlocking them like a prison guard opening cell doors at slop out time but for me these are different games. The one that sees people: fleet of foot, dancing through a psychotic back row, intent on destruction, is beautiful. There is a huge part of me that wishes I had the ability to step and dance like that. However, like my golf swing, which resembles a man throwing a sack of spuds onto a lorry, my stepping ability looks like a man trying to put out his shoes after they have been set alight.

The scrum though. The scrum is more than beautiful. When those eight men are locked together like a giant 3 headed mythical beast and stop being eight individuals; when the focus of the one, becomes the focus of all for five seconds of furious battle. They share the same goal, a destructive aggressive aim to rip apart the threat that sits in front of it. When you get a scrum right; when all the shoulders shunt up; when all the feet move forward at the same time, there is little sensation capable of bettering that feeling in the world; When the opposition start to grip on to the turf in a desperate bid to hold their ground before finally letting go and retreating. The feeling is primitive; the feeling is all the things we are encouraged not to feel in our lives; dominance of someone else through sheer physical force.

To the outsider it all sounds a bit odd, a bit of a weird thing to do for pleasure. To those who do it and most importantly enjoy it, there is no better place to be. That is the key though; there are hundreds of front row players who dream of being a ten, or an outside centre. They don’t want to be in the scrum, they are just biding their time for that call to glory. “Prop we need a new fly half, we decided on you”, is how they dream it will happen; it never does. These players are worth their weight in gold. The pillars of the game; you can have your miss pass, dummy switch, back inside to the full back. Me I would rather see a push over try.