Scrum down - trend sends set-piece backwards

Hailed by fans and players as one of the best Tests ever played, Ireland's Six Nations win over France had a grand total of five scrums.

Take out the freak incident in which James Lowe hit the spidercam at the start of the game and you have four.

Just imagine a World Rugby focus group looking at that game, which featured ball-in-play time of 46 minutes and 10 seconds. Recommendation: more of this please.

That figure of five is way below the average, which since 2017 has been around the 12-13 mark, according to RugbyDome figures, which didn’t count scrum resets.

While not typical, it does illustrate a wider trend in the game, which appears to suggest that the scrum is becoming less important than it once was.

A wider analysis, tracing back the numbers from the inaugural World Cup, shows a stark decrease in the set-piece.

The 1987 tournament had an average of 32 scrums per game, it was 22 in 2003 and 14 in 2019, as per StatsPerform.

Of course, the game entered the professional era over that period and the dynamic and purpose of the scrum changed, in general, from restarting the play to trying to win a penalty.

The engagement and power generated in the scrum today make those from the past look almost unrecognisable.

There are many reasons why there are fewer scrums.

These include an increase in skill levels that professionalism brought, better pitches and covered stadiums all combined to lower the number of handling errors, while various rule changes and game trends further reduced the amount of scrums.

The almost immediate referee’s call of 'advantage over’ following a opposition kick, no matter the quality, in a knock-on advantage has been a feature over the last decade or so; the tendency of referees to allow a ruck to develop for