The man who builds the scrum answers back
Daan Human waited, then went straight at it. The Springboks scrum coach faced reporters earlier today and rejected the idea that his front row wins ground by drifting sideways. He said he could never cheat, and that he has never told a player to walk around.
The accusation came from Dave Rennie. The All Blacks head coach suggested South Africa gain an illegal angle at the set-piece to win the hit. Rassie Erasmus had already pushed back once. Human putting his own name to the denial carries different weight, because he is the one who actually builds the scrum.
His promise for Saturday in Johannesburg was blunt. The Boks will work harder on precision, and they will keep aiming for what he called legal, straightforward dominance.
Try it for $0.99.
Six years of the same method
Human has coached the Springbok pack for six seasons, and he used that history as his defence. If the accusation holds, he argued, then South Africa have been walking around for six years without anybody stopping them.
He stopped short of claiming perfection. Things happen inside a scrum, one movement drags another with it, and he admitted the picture is not always clean. Striving to be perfect was as far as he would go.
The series explains why any of this matters. South Africa squeezed New Zealand at the scrum for close to an hour at Ellis Park in the opening Test. Last Saturday at DHL Stadium the contest evened out, and so did the series. It stands at 1-1 with one Test left.
Three Tests, three referees
Matthew Carley handled the first Test, Angus Gardner the second, and Nika Amashukeli has been handed the decider. Human refused to join the pile-on around Gardner. He called the Australian consistent, said the same calls went both ways, and left the subject there.
His plan for Amashukeli is adaptation rather than argument. If the Georgian asks the Boks to fix something, they fix it at the next scrum. That is the whole strategy, and it is a deliberately unglamorous one after a week in which every pundit in two countries has offered a theory about the set-piece.
Amashukeli now walks into a scrum that has been picked apart for seven days before a ball has been kicked.
Discover the rest of our Rugby news on MathODDS!
in your pocket.
Real-time notifications & alerts
Leave a Reply