It can be a frustration point for players if a fundamental part of your set piece lets you down on the night, and it can really have an impact on the rest of your game. And if the Highlanders' scrum didn't front up, they would have had a much more difficult time.
Off the back of that good work at scrum time, they were able to do what they've been doing all year, which was really nail opportunities with their talent.
There was a time when the Highlanders were a bit of a struggling team and you could go down there and pick them off, but this year they're proving to be nothing like that.
It doesn't bode well for the Blues this weekend, that's for sure.
With the Highlanders going so well, I think New Zealand will have three real contenders come the playoffs, especially when you compare our sides with some of the performances of the other nations.
When you look at Australia, apart from the Brumbies who I think will certainly be there, the Waratahs have been up and down, the Reds are woeful, the Rebels haven't been good and the Force are nothing like they were last year.
In South Africa, the Sharks are pretty awful, the Stormers haven't had a successful tour, and the Bulls are up and down. This Super Rugby season is a real fluctuating one for a lot of the franchises - the form is really inconsistent - but at least the New Zealand teams are showing some reasonable consistency.
The other thing I wanted to touch on is the frustration and, to a degree, confusion that's been surrounding the number of penalties in the scrum and the breakdown this season.
The scrum suffers due to a problem with the law interpretation, and it's becoming tedious. Every time there's a scrum now, everybody is holding their breath and thinking, 'please just let this ball go down and the scrum get cleared', otherwise we're faced with either a penalty or continual resets.
It's becoming a real blight on the game and it needs to be fixed very quickly, because they're soaking up lots of time and they're making it incredibly tiresome for viewers.
It needs to be sorted out by the players, the coaches and the referees in conjunction. They need to make it a real priority at this World Cup and make sure the future of the game is not dominated by scrummaging. It's still a reset of play and it still needs to be a contest, but not like it is now.
The second part of the issue is the breakdown. If you look at rugby, it has the most complicated law book in the world. Other sports, like rugby league and football, have a pretty simple set of rules.
Rugby's an extremely complicated sport, which makes it very difficult to referee. So we've got to have some sympathy for what the referees need to know, and it's not made easy by the continual changing of the laws of the breakdown from year to year. That's why we've got a lot of problems.
But I'm slightly going to contradict myself because I believe that one law change would really help clear up the breakdown confusion.
That would be to completely disempower the tackler in the breakdown, which means he can have no involvement.
He can't get up and play the ball, so you don't have problems with a clear release, he can't get on the wrong side and he doesn't get in the way.
The ball player has to release the ball and play, so it's equal rights. He's out of the game, the tackler's out of the game, and all the referees would have to look at is the next arriving players, who are all on their feet.
If we did that at the breakdown, we would take a lot of the confusion out of it and it would make it easier for the referees. I think that might really help the game and reduce all the frustration.
