Nine hundred kilos and one planted foot
Jeremy Paul has heard enough about the brake foot. The former Wallabies hooker spent part of Tuesday morning on the GBRANZ podcast pulling apart the law that turned the opening minutes of the Springboks’ win over the All Blacks into a scrummaging lecture, and he softened nothing.
“That is dangerous as hell, you’ve got 900 kilos behind you,” Paul said. “We’re going to go back to 5ft 5in hookers because anyone over 6ft 2in, you’re going to struggle.”
Paul packed down in the front row for Australia between 1998 and 2006, which gives the objection some weight. His argument is mechanical rather than emotional. A hooker asked to plant a flat front foot cannot load through the balls of his feet the way the seven men behind him do, and that mismatch travels straight up the spine.
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How the row started
New Zealand were pinged twice inside the opening exchanges at the weekend, first with a free-kick and then with a long-arm penalty. Referee Karl Dickson was unhappy on both occasions with where the hooker’s brake foot sat in the tunnel. All Blacks forwards coach Neil Barnes said afterwards that nobody in the game cares about the law, a line that travelled fast.
World Rugby brought the brake foot in four years ago. The stated purpose was more stability at the engagement and less axial loading, the pressure that runs through a front-rower’s head and neck. Paul reckons the governing body has produced the opposite, and he reserved a blunt word for whoever signed it off.
Kieran Read, alongside him on the show, took Barnes’ side without the anger. “It’s a pointless thing too, it makes no difference,” the All Blacks great said. “What you want is a scrum up and square, you want it up off the ground, so no matter how it gets there, keep it up, get it going. People don’t want to watch the reset.”
Paul’s fix is the hips
Rather than stop at a complaint, Paul handed officials a shortcut. Forget the choreography of feet and the endless argument about props walking around, he said, and referee the hips instead. On his own ball the loosehead keeps his hips tight to the hooker. On opposition ball he kicks them out because there is nowhere else to go. Spot the split, award the penalty, get on with it.
“It’s everything to do with your hips in a scrum. As soon as your hips start to split, that’s when you start to splinter,” he said. New Zealand meet Australia next in the Bledisloe Cup, where the same tunnel will be watched just as closely.
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