Graham Henry. Photo / Getty Images
The All Black scrum has attracted the beetle-browed attention of coach Graham Henry.
Once he and his staff distilled their thoughts on the opening test against Ireland, the scrum came out top of their must-fix list.
"We were okay on our own ball but we did not break them apart,
did we?" Henry said yesterday. "I thought that was one of the disappointments of the game."
Henry accepted there were disruptions with multiple second-half substitutions in the forwards, but he felt the All Blacks should have dominated far more.
"I did not think we were as potent at scrum as we should have been, particularly when they only had seven," he said.
Wales did not have a better scrum than Ireland and he hoped the All Blacks would improve more for the final test outing at Carisbrook on Saturday.
Often when teams were of unequal scrummaging ability, tests became messy because one side did not want to engage properly in that part of the game.
"Which I find exceptionally irritating because it ruins the game," Henry said, "and you will see when we play the Springboks and the French it is a bloody good game of football because both sides want to scrum."
When there was a disparity in ability and technique, and scrums were disrupted, referees often found it difficult to adjudicate on the culprit. Often the best scrum got penalised and that, said Henry, created a great deal of playing and coaching frustration.
This week's referee is George Clancy from Ireland.
