At his team-naming press conference in Cape Town on Thursday, the All Blacks head coach twice steered the conversation back to the Springbok scrum, and confirmed his camp has raised it with the governing body. REVIEW: Thursday 27 August.
Nobody asked him the second time.
There was a minute of the press conference left, the question on the table was about ball-in-play time, and Dave Rennie took it back to the scrum anyway. That is the tell. A head coach who returns to the same subject from two unrelated questions is telling you what he has actually spent the week thinking about.
What he wants the referee to stop is very specific, and it is worth holding until the law is on the table beside it, because the two do not fit together as neatly as the quote suggests.
Add a winning margin for points
Start with the fact that his side won. New Zealand beat South Africa 33-16 at Ellis Park on Saturday 22 August, five tries to one, ending a 12-Test Springbok winning run and taking the world No.1 ranking. They also spent the better part of an hour being dismantled at scrum time, which is the contradiction this whole week has been built on and which the All Blacks pack was rushing at Ellis Park rather than being out-muscled set out in detail on Monday.
Three things he wants better, and the third came with a phone call
Asked where the improvement has to come, Rennie listed the contact area and then discipline, flatly and without excuses.
“In the contact area, especially early when they’re full of energy… we struggle to get go forward, and so we need to be a lot better around that area. Discipline wise, we gave away just way too many soft penalties, especially early in the game, which is disappointing because it’s something we’ve spoken about. You give them easy entry into your 22.”
Then, unprompted, he added a third.
“I think scrum wise… we’ve obviously spoken with World Rugby around a couple issues from our point of view and… we think scrum wise we’ll be a lot better, and that was a massive in for them last week.”
Read that again. He is not complaining to the press about the officiating. He is telling the press that the complaint has already been made somewhere else.
That lands differently in a week when neither coach would sit in a refereeing meeting with the other before this series, and it lands differently again alongside what he said about the change of official.
“Angus was going to be involved on the edge anyway, and so they have been having discussions based on, I’d imagine, things that South Africa sent in… and likewise with us.”
Both camps, then, have filed. That is normal. Saying so on camera is less so.
The two he named first are the two that actually cost them
Here is the awkward part of Rennie’s own answer, and he clearly knows it, because he put them in that order himself.
Contact and discipline were the problems at Ellis Park. The first-half penalty count, per the match reports, ran 9-4 to South Africa. Those penalties are what gave the Springboks the field position that produced nine entries into the New Zealand 22 by the 64th minute, on Planet Rugby’s post-match count of the game.
South Africa got 1.1 points out of each of those entries. New Zealand made six visits and got 4.3.
That is not a set-piece story. That is a discipline story with a set-piece prologue, and the reason New Zealand won by 17 is that the hosts could not convert a platform they built almost entirely from soft penalties and long kicks.
Read also: why the set piece remains South Africa’s key Test advantage, because none of what follows argues that the Springbok scrum is anything other than the best in the world.
What “step sideways and walk around us” actually means
Now the quote that has been sitting unopened since the top of this piece. Last answer of the press conference, question about ball in play, and he goes here instead.
“The expectation is our scrum will be a lot better. We think if they’re forced to scrum square and not allowed to step sideways and walk around us, then we’ll be able to stay in front of that and we’ll be able to obviously get footy going off that.”
He is describing a wheel, which is what the Springbok scrum did to New Zealand for the better part of an hour. A dominant pack drives at an angle rather than straight, the scrum rotates, the defending pack has to move its feet to stay square, and the moment feet move the drive stops transmitting forward. It is one of the oldest ways of beating a scrum that will not go backwards.
The trouble is what World Rugby’s laws say about it.
Law 19.19 is the one Rennie is leaning on: players may push “provided they do so straight and parallel to the ground.” Law 19.34(c) covers the outcome, ordering a reset when a scrum “is wheeled through more than 90 degrees, so the middle line has passed beyond a position parallel to the touchline.”
There is no clause at senior level that prohibits wheeling a scrum on purpose. That prohibition exists in the Under-19 law variations, where a deliberate wheel is outlawed and 45 degrees is enough to force a reset. In the adult game it was taken out.
So the thing Rennie wants stopped is only stoppable in two situations: when an individual prop stops pushing straight, which is a penalty, or when the wheel passes 90 degrees, which is a reset rather than a penalty. Everything between those two points is legal, and the Springbok scrum is the best in the world at living in it.
The penalty that suggests the referee was already watching for it
There is a moment in the first Test that cuts against the complaint, and it happens to be the moment that won the match.
South Africa had won three straight scrum penalties in the second half. Then, at a five-metre attacking scrum with the game at 19-16, they were penalised on their own feed against the replacement front row of George Bower, Asafo Aumua and Fletcher Newell. The offence was wheeling. It was the first scrum penalty they conceded all afternoon and it came from the 54th-minute front-row change that turned the first Test.
Referee Matthew Carley saw it, called it, and New Zealand went up the other end.
A referee who has already penalised the wheel once, in the biggest moment of the game, is not a referee who needs a submission explaining the wheel to him.
Erasmus is not arguing about the Springbok scrum at all
The counter-case is worth stating properly, because South Africa are not disputing the premise.
Springboks head coach Rassie Erasmus went the other way after the match. His side dominated the set piece, and he still identified that 58th-minute penalty on their own feed as the moment it turned. Rassie Erasmus named the scrum that lost Ellis Park and then refused to treat the defeat as a structural failure.
“We didn’t need to learn from this; we knew what we had to do.”
Two coaches, then, agreed on the same scrum and disagreed entirely about what it proved. Erasmus thinks his side gave a Test away with errors. Rennie thinks the Springbok scrum was working outside the laws and that his side got out of Johannesburg anyway.
Both of those can be true. Only one of them requires the referee to do something different on Saturday, and that is the one being briefed to World Rugby.
The honest read is that Rennie is right about the mechanism and stretching it as a grievance. The Springbok scrum did walk around New Zealand at Ellis Park. It is also, on the current laws, entitled to, right up until a prop angles in or the middle line swings past parallel. Angus Gardner takes the whistle in Cape Town after a late swap with a submission from both camps in his inbox and no new law to apply.
If the All Blacks pack sets earlier, binds longer and drives a second time instead of surviving the first hit, the wheel never gets started and none of this matters. That correction is available to them without anyone in Dublin picking up a phone.
Read next: New Zealand lost the first hour at Ellis Park and won the Test by 17 anyway, which is the fuller version of how a beaten scrum produced a 17-point win.
Your turn
The position here is that Rennie has correctly described something legal and framed it as something illegal, and that the fix is in his own front row rather than in a referee’s briefing note.
The law text is above. The five-metre scrum that was penalised is above. Take it apart.
