May the dire fare witnessed in the HEC persuade IRB that scrummaging laws need changing

Robert Kitson of the Guardian wrote:This piece was going to be a collection of end-of-year reflections, bound up in a little seasonal tinsel. Then the Ospreys hosted Saracens at the Liberty Stadium on Friday night. The first half ranked so far off the scale of viewing misery, even for Sarries fans, that Scrooge himself would have lunged for his TV remote and opted for something more uplifting. It was enough to make you fear for professional rugby's future, if not its soul.

Bad matches happen. Referees have ordinary games. Scrums can collapse through no fault of the participants. But when all those things occur simultaneously during the first 40 minutes of a game that should have showcased everything good about the Heineken Cup and European club rugby the alarm bells begin to sound. Ding Dong Merrily on High? Hardly.

Instead of delving exclusively into the grim stats – 11 of the first 12 scrums penalised, 14 of the game's 26 penalties awarded for scrummaging illegalities – let us remind ourselves what the coaches said afterwards. "I don't know where we are going in the scrums," said the Ospreys coach, Sean Holley, in no mood to deck the halls with boughs of anything festive. "Maybe we would be better off without them." His Sarries counterpart, Mark McCall, took a similar view: "In the old days you used to practise scrum moves but coaches have stopped doing that as there is a free-kick or penalty at every scrum so there is no need. The scrums were carnage."

Were this an isolated problem it could be swiftly overlooked. Sadly, it has become a widespread curse, particularly during the European winter when pitches soften up and props find it harder to retain their footing. During the World Cup it emerged that three outstanding former Lions props, Fran Cotton, Mike Burton and Ray McLoughlin, have submitted a paper to the International Rugby Board arguing that 13 of the current scrummaging laws need changing. They believe many of the current laws are "unjust, illogical and inoperable" and that the scrum is increasingly a lottery.

They also suggest the current command of "Crouch, touch, pause, engage" be replaced by "Stand, touch, engage, push". They argue this would reduce the so-called "hit" and, potentially, reduce neck and back injuries, not to mention arthritis in later life. There is too much good sense contained within their work for it to be ignored and Friday's match may further help persuade the IRB that something has to change.

Among the proposals is that scrum penalties should not result in kicks at goal, a suggestion most self-respecting props would regard as excessive. But unless you have a referee who genuinely understands the scrum – France's Romain Poite is among those who clearly enjoys a good scrummaging contest – the possibility for tight games to be decided on spurious grounds has never been as high as it is nowadays. Jerome Garces, the official in charge of the Ospreys-Saracens non-event – appeared to lose the players' respect early on and his absurdly elongated pronunciation of the word "pause" made things even worse.

The problems, of course, run deeper than simple linguistic issues. During the Ireland v Australia World Cup pool game, refereed by Bryce Lawrence, there were 22 scrums, 11 collapses and seven penalties, while 43% of the game's points came from scrummage offences (it would have been more had the kickers been successful with all their attempts). During last year's Six Nations the "collapse rate" was 67 per 100 scrums. Add all this together and doing nothing is no longer an option.

Maybe they should simply lock Cotton, Burton, McLoughlin, Mike Cron, Graham Rowntree, Ewen McKenzie and a couple of gnarled specimens from France and Argentina in the same room and refuse to send in any food until they have hammered out the way forward. One suspects you would have a workable, no-nonsense solution by lunchtime. The general public might also care to read the Kiwi scrum expert Brendon Ratcliffe's excellent prop's-eye-view article on why the scrum still matters. No one in rugby wants to see the scrum disappear but the events of last Friday night were a truly gruesome glimpse into the abyss.