Kiss wants law changes to end scrum shambles

Ireland assistant coach Les Kiss wants rugby’s decision makers to finally address the “blight” on the gamefollowing Leinster and Munster’s scrum fiasco on Saturday.

The provincial giants’ joust in Thomond Park was starved of meaningful action after a succession of collapsed scrums slowed the pace of the game. Munster manager Anthony Foley labelled it the “current cancer for the game” in his post-match interview and Kiss agreed it must become more attractive.

“I think when we played Scotland, there was 20 minutes of scrums and repacks, that’s phenomenal in a game,” he said on Setanta Sports’ iTalkSport yesterday.

“I think it’s a blight on the game and personally I think there should be a lot of resources put behind it to make sure we get it right because the game deserves something better in that area.”

However, the Australian believes the scrum is anessential part of the game and must be kept in the sport no matter what changes are made.

“It’s a great part of the game, in actual fact it’s anessential part of the game. You don’t want to take away the contest. You want real scrummaging to prevail and at the moment there’s teams trying to win the hit rather than win the scrum and maybe the laws allow that to happen.

“So maybe they’ve got to tweak things where they get to a point where we have real valid scrums. We have a platform where we can launch some really good effective back play from.”

With referees being forced to decide why a scrum collapsed, he claimed decisions have become a lottery.

“The reality is that a ref has to make a call and there are so many variables in a scrum hit and things can go wrong. Sometimes it’s an educated guess by them and you get one group of people who say it should have been a penalty the other way and one group of people saying no that was the right penalty. So where is right or wrong?

“In a way it becomes a bit of a lottery at times and it seems sometimes a tit-for-tat I’ll give this one to this team this time and I’ll give that one to that team that time. Because can they ever be wrong? You can always find some type of technicality that he could ref against there.

“Unfortunately that’s where it is at the moment. It would be nice to be able to take all that time out of the game, get some clean scrums. How they do that? They’ve got some experts on that and hopefully we’ll see that improve over the next year.”

However, despite his interest in the match, Kissadmitted he will not be putting his name forward for the Munster head coach’s job.

“It was thrown at me earlier about whether I was going to throw my hat in the ring but I haven’t. I’m only six months into a new contract with theIrish team and I think Munster are well under way to isolating some candidates for that job.

“I won’t be putting my name forward for it.”