'Free swing': Marcus Smith demands England 'stand up and fight' against Ireland

He is just showing the new need for what you suggest, some good analysis into the result of all the previous decades changes to scrums.

The trick is about enabling it to work that way. Being able to opt for a penalty (as is suggested being removed as an option) instead of capitalizing on your scrum dominance acheivers neither of those two things.

So straight away, as a analyst we can see that you would appreciate the suggestions in this article once you saw it played out, even if you can't picture their worth/value now.

Rugby is a balanced game, meant for all shapes and sizes.

Yep, I think you would certainly love them!

But speeding them up further is not the answer (no one has suggested it as a solution so not sure why were talking abuot?) to anything, no, it is about player safety now. Results will be made by increasing their success rate. And you make a very good point that it is all about balance anyway.

It won't be rugby at that point DP, so nobody will be watching rugby! A sobering thought everyone at WR should keep in mind.

Well maybe more than a couple of questions, just to be clear. What exactly did this penalty stop you from doing the the first time that you want to try again? What was this offence that stopped you doing it? Then ask yourself how often would this occur in the game. Now, thinking about the regularity of it and compare it to how it was/would be used throughout the rest of the game (in cases other than the example you gave/didn't give for some unknown reason).

What sort of balance did you find?

Now, we don't want to complicate things further by bringing into the discussion points Bull raised like 'entirety' or 'replaced with a ruck', so instead I'll agree that if we use this article as a trigger to expanding our opinions/thoughts, why not allow a scrum to be reset if that is what they(you) want? Stopping the clock for it greatly removes the need to stop 5 minutes of scrum feeds happening. Fixing the law interpretations (not incorrectly rewarding the dominant team) and reducing the amount of offences that result in a penalty would greatly reduce the amount of repeat scrums in the first place. And now that refs a card happy, when a penalty offence is committed it's going to be far more likely it results in the loss of a player, then the loss of scrums completely and instead having a 15 on 13 advantage for the scrum dominant team to then run their opposition ragged. So why not take the scrum again (maybe you've already asked yourself that question by now)?

It will kind be like a Power Play in Hockey. Your outlook here is kind of going to depend on your understanding of what removing repeat scrums was put in place for, but I'm happy the need for it is gone in a new world order. As I've said on every discussion on this topic, scrums are great, it is just what they result in that hasn't been. Remove the real problem and scrum all you like. The All Blacks will love zapping that energy out of teams.

Dmac needed a season in the hot seat, and time to grow his game.

The Ireland match was at the end of the year- so he’s had plenty of time to grow- and Razor’s patience (while not his first option) was rewarded with his performance.

That performance needs to be his bench mark going forward. Dmac can’t regress back to what he was like at the beginning of e season.

Those two players have developed, both were extremely effective against Ireland, hopefully they keep it up.

Acknowledging that is only fair.

How much of a scrum twisting has to do with the forces being misalligned (due to how scrums are formed)?

DMac had one of his two outstanding test starts of the 10 tests he started to go along with two terrible tests (Argentina 1 and Australia 1) and 6 hot & cold tests.

Serious depth, and mostly young.