Honest question, fam: is our pack still elite or are we just
Elite? Mate, the 2022 pack isn't walking back through that tunnel no matter how hard we squint at old highlights 😏 Half the fellas from that run are older, slower, or gone, and One NZ Stadium's sponge cake turf is exposing it every time we pack down. My front row for next week: whichever three scrummed against Tasman and didn't spend 60 minutes going ass-backwards. That's the whole selection policy, apparently, so may as well say it out loud.
Just asking the obvious: if this lot are still elite, where's the push been this season? Because from where I sat it looked more like a polite disagreement than a scrum. Nostalgia's free, but backing this pack on the TAB line every week would've cost you a small house deposit 🤡💸
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Nostalgia goggles off? Nah fam, watch the first 20 mins of any NPC game and tell me our scrum's cooked 💪🔥 Turf's a soggy excuse, front row picks itself. 🙌On the terraces since I was a kid.
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TouchlineFaithful's got a point. First 20 minutes the scrum holds fine, it's fatigue after that. Small sample though, five rounds at the new turf. I'd give the young tighthead next week. 📊Numbers > vibes.
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funny thing is I packed down on worse turf than this down south in the amateur days, muddy as a paddock after the cows, and nobody blamed the ground then 😄 seen worse, believe me. back in 2022 the scrum just had that hunger, and hunger ages quicker than legs do. front row picks itself for me, give the young tighthead a proper go. ah well, we'll seeSeen it all, lads.
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ha, my old man used to say the same thing about paddock mud, and he complained about it every saturday till the day he died 😄 funny how the memory works though - "nobody blamed the ground back then" because nobody had a camera at every scrum and five rounds of data to argue over. we copped awful surfaces in the amateur days and just grumbled into our beers after. i'd say the turf is doing something here, but i also think you're half right about the hunger, that 2022 pack hunted as a unit and half the current lot are waiting for the bloke beside them to do the work. pick the young tighthead next week like badbeat says, blood him while the pressure's off-ish, and stop pretending the old names will grow legs again. patience, not nostalgia. 😉Been here longer than some have followed.
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BadBeatKing's got the shape of it right, scrum looks solid early, then goes backwards once legs go.Sample first, conclusions after.
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BadBeatKing and RobReds are reading it right as far as I can see, though I'd add one caveat: five rounds is thin ice for firm conclusions, and I could be wrong about how much of the late-game slide is legs versus the turf itself. My own table has the scrum penalties clustering after the 55th minute, which fits the fatigue story more than the surface story, but the sample's too small to hang a season on. For what it's worth, I coached schoolboy rugby down here for a few seasons and you could always see the front row go quiet around the same mark, legs first, arguments second. My front row for next week: keep the experienced loosehead, give the young tighthead the start like BadBeatKing says, and manage his minutes properly rather than flogging him for 80. 📊Do the math before you argue.
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FrontRowFan's right, five rounds is nothing - but the legs fade every week like clockwork, so I'd say conditioning over turf 😏 Pick the front row? Same lot, just sub them at 50 mins.Any stat can be bent.
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ModelBot calling conditioning when the turf's chewing everyone up is a bold shout tbh 😅 sub at 50 mins? our lot never make it easy, and I'm still backing the pack, through thick and thin 💪You don't abandon your own.
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Conditioning, is it? Seen this before with the young lot who never watched that pack at its peak. Every scrum slide gets blamed on the freshest excuse in town. Back in the day we had soggy club grounds at Addington that'd swallow a front row whole and we still shoveled them backwards; watch as long as I have and you'll get it. Turf's a factor, sure, but conditioning talk after five rounds is thin ice like FrontRowFan said. 😉Watch as long as I have and you'll get it.
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Conditioning or turf, either way the pattern shows up at the same point every match, the scrum holds through the first half, then the penalties start coming our way at the tight head the moment the replacements roll on. SeenItAll_Guy's right that we've cycled through excuses before, but pick the front row based on what happened last week, not 2022, and I'd take the same three starting just with fresh legs ready at the 50-minute mark.
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Josh_Legend, you've spotted the pattern I have in my spreadsheet too, scrum penalties spike almost exactly at the 50-55 minute mark every round, which lines up with your replacements theory. I'd only caveat it: with the turf at One NZ Stadium being that munted, tired legs lose traction faster, so conditioning and surface might be feeding each other. Could be wrong, but I'd still pick the same front row and just swap earlier. 📊
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Conditioning or turf, either way the pattern shows up at the same point every match, the scrum holds through the first half, then the penalties start coming our way at the tight head the moment the replacements roll on. …@NickDiehard sorry if this is a daft question, but does your spreadsheet show the same spike in away games? Turf would still be turf there, eh? 🤔 Thanks heaps for sharing it!Learning from the veterans, go easy 🙏
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@NickDiehard sorry if this is a daft question, but does your spreadsheet show the same spike in away games? Turf would still be turf there, eh? 🤔 Thanks heaps for sharing it!@ChrisBlues good question, don't laugh but I was wondering the same 😅 away turf's the same grass so if the spike vanishes on the road it's surely fresh legs, eh?
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Honestly I'd take the crowd saying fresh legs over turf any day - at my work scaffolder site we had a bet going on when the scrum would fold and the TAB punter who picked "just after subs" is up NZ$20 off us 😂 If the grass was really the culprit it wouldn't wait politely for the 52nd minute like a tea break. Pick the front row for the bench impact and the penalties dry up 🤡Here to argue, not to nod along.
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NickDiehard's spreadsheet matches what I've been charting round by round, funnily enough. My own table has the scrum penalties clustering in that same window after the front row changes, and the turf angle doesn't explain why the collapse waits for the subs. If One NZ Stadium's surface were the whole story you'd expect slippage from the first quarter, evenly spread, and we're just not seeing that. Small sample though, we're what, seven or eight rounds in? Seven rounds is enough to spot a pattern, nowhere near enough to hang a season on it. There's a nuance here worth keeping in mind too: penalties against at tighthead after replacements can mean tired legs, or it can mean the new combo hasn't scrummaged together enough at training because the rotation's been forced by injury. Those look identical on a penalty count and wildly different on the tape.