By NORM TASKER

As I watched the Gordon scrum demolish Warringah a month or so back, the penalties flowed as they always do against the weaker scrum. It happens in every game. Such was the frustration of a Warringah front-rower after the umpteenth penalty against him he button-holed the referee with a question.

“Are we doing anything illegal?” he inquired. “Or are they just too good for us.” The referee seemed flummoxed. It is a question that could be asked, probably should be asked, scrum after scrum, game after game.

Scrums in the modern game are a mess. They frustrate us all . . . for the interminable time they take to complete, for the flood of ridiculous penalties that flow from them and for the negative process of “milking” penalties that they too easily encourage.

The question that the Warringah prop put to the referee captured succinctly one of the great ills of the modern game.

At the scrum at least, penalties continually are awarded against innocent forwards whose sin is no greater than that they lack the strength or the technique to counter a more competent adversary.

Back in the 1970s, I was coaching Gordon when we all started to power up the scrum. It was exciting then to launch destructive eight-man shoves, to tire people out, to dominate games through no other mechanism than eight heaving bodies demolishing their opposition. We never imagined it would get out of hand as it has. 

A good scrum is still a wonder of human mechanics. But there are not enough of them. The difficulties of the scrum have become endemic, and they are making the game frustratingly hard to watch.

I remember one recent Test match where somebody got sent off, meaning the scrum was eight against seven for the rest of the game. The eight predictably massacred the seven. But as the scrum screwed and popped, and the power of one side destroyed the other, the referee simply penalised the weaker scrum over and over again. I thought that represented double jeopardy, as if playing a man short wasn’t enough. 

In another Gordon game recently, a front-row decimated by injury was struggling to counter their Southern District rivals near the end of the game. Penalty after penalty just drew reset scrums. In the end the referee sin-binned a Gordon player. That solved everything. A sin-binned player leaves, an inferior player takes his place. Things just get worse.

In that particular case, after an interminable delay, a suitable replacement prop could not be found, so they went with uncontested scrums. The weaker scrum thought it was Christmas. And the game sprang to life.

A further huge problem is that it is too easy these days to milk a penalty at the scrum. Holding at the back and waiting for the referee to give you three points is one of the more negative developments of recent times. Referees are looking after their jobs too and using no imagination whatsoever. 

It is time I reckon to do away with scrum penalties altogether, substituting a free kick which MUST be taken (no repeat scrum option). Preferably by a tap kick. Just get on with it. 

The scrum is a complex mix of extreme forces that is difficult to control at the best of times. A tight head will want to take a loose head down, a loose head will want to lift the tight head up. When the scrum collapses, who do you blame?

The certain thing is that it can’t continue as it has. I have had a deep involvement in rugby since the late 1950s, and the game is a huge part of my life. I have played it, refereed it, coached it, written about it and loved it. But these days I find myself yelling at the television and turning off games to which I once would have been glued. So many of my mates are doing the same thing. 

The problems of course are wider than just the scrum. Security of possession and the defensive necessity that has produced have made power more important than skill, and developed a trend to body shapes that have made it a collision game, where running over people takes precedence over creating gaps or skilful evasion.

Do you ever watch replays of the game from 20 or 30 years ago? When players like Ella and Campese, Horan and Papworth did their thing. It was a different game. And, I would suggest, a better game.

The modern breakdown and the ills that it has encouraged is another tale for another day. But the fact is the game is suffering mightily from a torrent of penalties, long periods of inactivity, and the interminable boredom of forwards “taking it up”. A thorough re-think of the laws is long overdue.

At its heart Rugby is a wonderful game, and we still see that from time to time. But we will never get the best out of it as a matter of course until we start to fix some of the things that drag it down.