Diamond demands cut in time spent on ‘boring’ scrums
➤ Sale Sharks chief warns delays will drive fans away ➤ Coach rejects criticism that some players failed to take knee
Steve Diamond has urged administrators to speed up scrums, calling for a time limit because delays before eight-man set-pieces have become “absolutely boring”.
He also labelled Premiership referees’ approach to scrummaging “guesswork”, suggesting that incomprehensible penalties and delays would drive existing and potential fans away from the sport.
“What King Herod was to babysitting, scrums are to entertainment in rugby,” said Sale’s director of rugby. “It is absolutely boring. I am not the first person to say it… and I am a former hooker!” Diamond admitted his team underperformed during Friday night’s 16-10 defeat by Harlequins, a game he described as “dour”.
Sale struggled at the breakdown, with referee Luke Pearce penalising them 16 times.
Diamond has been in contact with Tony Spreadbury, the Rugby Football Union’s refereeing boss, since. But he is far more frustrated with “Morris dancing” at line-outs and modern scrummaging habits.
According to data from Opta, part of Stats Perform, the match at the Twickenham Stoop contained 15 scrums and two resets. Added to hold-ups for injuries, replacements and water breaks, they took the length of the match from 80 minutes to 1 hr 38 min 46 sec, excluding the half-time break.
Of that period, just 24min 58sec constituted “ball-in-play” time. That left 1hr 13min 48sec of waiting for action to restart – the largest amount of “dead” time across the six weekend fixtures.
“I think [the change in breakdown emphasis] does give fair competition,” Diamond said. “Equally so, if you look at a lot of games over the weekend, the timings of the scrum set-ups are enormous. They take minutes. It’s crazy.
“Where they need to spend their attention is sorting that area out – all the b-----ing around and the resets, not being in the right position. Free-kick it and give it to the other team. Let’s get on with it.”
A conversation with former England and Sale scrum-half Steve Smith caused Diamond to review scrums from the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties.
By his estimation, they were “three times quicker” than those of
today. “For me, there are far more important things in the game,” Diamond added. “Get the line-outs quickly, get the scrums quickly. People want to see the ball in Chris Ashton’s hands, Denny Solomona’s hands or Manu Tuilagi’s hands. They want to see skill at high pace and they want to see collisions, end of story.”
Because stopping the clock could compromise broadcast plans, Diamond’s solution would be to reduce the stoppage-to-scrum gap to 15 seconds from the nominal 30 permitted.
“I appear rude to some people around it,” Diamond said. “But I honestly do not think people know what they are doing when they are officiating in the scrums.
“It is so cloak and danger and so difficult to interpret who has pushed and who has pulled, who has gone low and who has gone high. It is absolute guesswork.” Such confusion, Diamond believes, will cost interest among viewers as “people don’t understand it”.
Meanwhile, Diamond dismissed the concerns of South Africa’s sports minister, Nathi Mthethwa, who contacted the South African Rugby Union after seeing a number of Sale players – including World Cup-winning Springboks Lood de Jager and Faf de Klerk – remain standing during the moment to signal support for the Blacks Lives Matter movement before the game on Friday.
“Four of our players took the knee, and that’s their entitlement, and the rest didn’t,” he said. “I think it’ll be a storm in a teacup. We all wore ‘Rugby Against Racism’ T-shirts, which we thought was important.”