Scrumboks!

“Scrum, scrum, scrum!” The immortal words whispered down from Springbok generation to generation. Someone must have forgotten to tell the vintage of 2009. The Springbok year-end tour is destined for the annals of disaster as the Springboks succumbed to their third tour defeat in a row against “SA – Racens” last night.

The English are a strange bunch. Fifty thousand people at Wembley to watch a motley bunch of legionnaires take on a beleaguered Springbok team! They must have smelt the blood, because it’s dripping scarlet from the South African 2009 tour effort.

I actually thought the team played quite well. Heini Adams battled gamely, Ruan Pienaar had a reasonable outing (if you ignore a crucial penalty and conversions missed and a drop kick out on the full), Andries Bekker was a tower of strength in the first half and the back three of Rose, Ndungane and Nokwe were full of running. With reference to my previous column I saw two players of genuine class: Alistair Hargreaves and Juan de Jongh.

The Springboks lost, quite simply, at scrum time. Both Saracens tries came after powerful scrums. The first try from a scrum on our ball with scrumhalf Francois Hougaard under pressure and his kick charged down. The following attacking scrum nearly led to a push over for Saracens and resulted in Barritt’s try. Add to that the number of short arm or full penalties conceded at the scrum time. When the Boks did get the ball out, they were going backwards at a rate.

The Boks are going to have to be twenty points better than their opposition if they’re going to win a match on tour with the way their scrum is being refereed. And there are only two left! I assume we’ll get past Italy. But Ireland?

What has happened to the Springbok scrum? No selection issues to blame it on this time — this was the power front row of CJ van der Linde, Adriaan Strauss and Wian du Preez. What happened to the days when Jake White used to say that the Maties III XV had better rankers than the Australian national team? The Springboks used to relish a chance to bump heads with their opposition. Last night they looked like nervous teenagers as they approached the first scrum. Clearly the refs have been watching our games and realised that our “Crouch, Touch, Engage” ensemble are deserving of a shrill blast on the whistle. I think our big boys in the front are too scared to push in case they get penalised for … pushing?

I won’t say too much about James Jones. Suffice to say that if Saracens hire him for all their home games, they’ll be hard to beat.

De Villiers has complained, he doesn’t understand why we are being penalised at scrum time. Me neither. But best he finds out fast. The scrum has eroded the Bok’s confidence and a loss to Ireland will make the Tri-Nations victory and the Lions series win seem like light years away.

Peter Church is the author of local thriller Dark Video, published in South Africa 2008 and Australia 2009.