Imagine for a moment you are in the fortune teller’s tent and the crystal ball is sparkling. The atmosphere is suitably spooky and there may even be the odd unexplained bump in the background. You are primed and ready to hear some rugby predictions for the big games ahead as the medium fixes you with a beady eye. There is a pregnant pause full of drama.
If you had been told beforehand Ireland would lose to South Africa in November, you might have believed it. If the prediction had gone further, explaining the men in green would give up 18 penalties, four yellow cards and one red in defeat, your face would have darkened to the point of incredulity. You would have demanded your money back.
Ireland were the most disciplined team at the 2025 Six Nations, and one of only two nations to emerge from the tournament with a plus score from the penalties awarded/conceded differential.
Look at little deeper, at the scrum penalty differential among the top three nations in 2024 and 2025, and the story is rather different. England sit at the top with +11 penalties with France just behind them on +8, while Ireland have slipped back to minus three. The scrum has never been the dominant piece of kit in the Irish toolbox, but they have been steadily dropping behind their two main rivals at the set-piece.
The average number of scrums set over the last two Six Nations is only 12 per match, but the impacts rippling out from set-piece still send a shudder down the spine of any side looking to be a major contender. Those tremors are physical and psychological, and there is often a tendency for the team on the losing end of the scrum battle to over-compensate in other areas of the game.
Seventy-nine-cap prop Andrew Porter recently reflected on the set-piece debacle against South Africa. ‘Ports’ and his fellow Leinsterman at loose-head, Paddy McCarthy, conceded eight penalties and two yellow cards between them for offences at the scrum.
“That game…I take that as a good thing now. Obviously, you’re not thinking that way when it happens. But it’s better to have it [now], better than it happens in the Six Nations with Ireland, or down the road in the World Cup in 2027.
“You’d rather have those learnings, I suppose, at this stage rather than, I suppose, down the line. You can be winning all you want and then you have that game and that’s the one that will stick out.
“You do everything you can to kind of rectify that and not have it kind of happen again.”
In reality Porter may still be bristling under the skin and would rather those hateful “learnings” never had to be made at all. That one game has painted a target on the backs of the Irish front row and opened up a pathway to success against them.
As Porter elaborated further: “You’d rather get a penalty [from scrum] than just play off it, [to] give yourself field position. If you’ve got a scrum going back, and you’re being kicked to the corner against a big pack it’s always a tough day.”
Porter is a very rare breed. He is one of only two props in the global front-row firmament who can deliver a top-class performance on both sides of the scrum. The other? One Thomas du Toit, Porter’s immediate opponent in the scrum disaster last November. You probably would have to reach back into the amateur era, to the likes of Fran Cotton and ‘Topo’ Rodriquez, to find others who could do the same at the highest level of the game.
Make no mistake, Porter belongs in such elite company and he should make the move back to number three post-haste, for the good of Leinster and Ireland. He was selected on the 2021 British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa as the main back-up to his team-mate for club and country, Tadhg Furlong, before having to withdraw with a toe injury.
When ‘Ports’ was shifted across to loosehead after that tour, the move made complete sense. Now it is equally obvious he should move in the opposite direction. As Leinster forwards coach Rob McBryde observed: “I remember one of the reasonings behind him moving from tight to loose [in 2021] was to get our two best props [Porter and Furlong] on the pitch at the same time. It could work the other way [now]. If Paddy [McCarthy] keeps on going the way he is, then why not? I think he’s more than capable, Andrew, of doing that.”
With the fast emergence of McCarthy and Jack Boyle developing behind him; with Furlong coming towards the end of a glittering career, and Porter’s own well-publicised difficulty convincing referees his technique at loosehead is legal, the runes have already been read.
Porter enjoyed a few telltale minutes at number three off the bench against Connacht in URC round nine – at least, as much as anyone in their right mind can relish playing with their head in a vice-like ‘nutcracker’ between two men opposite: “I remember in the warm-up, I hit one scrum in tight-head and I was like ‘Jesus, it’s easy, isn’t it?’ [Later] in the game, I was like, ‘Jesus, my legs are gone here’. It’s just like riding a bike, but upside down. I’m loosehead at the moment. Down the line, you never know.”
One thing is certain. Until Ireland do something definite around the table of front row selection, their chief rivals at the Six Nations will continue to get after them at scrum-time, create a magic circle of flawed ‘tendencies’ around the referee in the build-up to the game, and summon the ghosts of 22 November.
The first herald of the coming onslaught came in the Leinster-La Rochelle Champions Cup pool game at the weekend. It was refereed by Englishman Matt Carley, who also happened to be the man in the middle during Ireland’s scrum drubbing by the Boks. Les Bagnards may have fallen from grace since the heady days of back-to-back Champions Cup victories over Leinster in 2022 and 2023; they only sit seventh in the current Top 14 and the jungle drums have already started beating for head coach Ronan O’Gara’s departure from the club.
But on Saturday they welcomed back the enormous right side of their scrum, all 280kg combined of tighthead Uini Atonio and his arch support Will Skelton. It gave Ireland an important presentiment of what they will face in Paris in less than three weeks, with Atonio likely to start and Toulousain behemoth Manny Meafou doing his best impersonation of Big Will at tighthead lock behind him.
The Leinster/Ireland front-row of McCarthy, Lions hooker Dan Sheehan and Tom Clarkson, which could well run on against Les Bleus on 5 February, creaked and groaned. It bent but it didn’t completely break as it had against the Boks.
The home side gave up three scrum penalties while Atonio was on the field, but the impact on overall discipline was only slightly more muted than it had been against South Africa
In both matches there appears to be a direct correlation between a scrum under pressure and a breakdown in general discipline with Leinster/Ireland giving up five more penalties and two or three more yellow cards in front of a home crowd. With Karl Dickson due to blow the whistle at the Stade de France, there will be another English referee, too.
The first job will be to convince Dickson the Ireland loosehead can stay straight under the heat Atonio will bring inside, towards Sheehan, just like Porter’s nemesis Du Toit.
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) November 23, 2025
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) January 11, 2026
McCarthy will stay squarer than Porter, with his hips closer to his hooker throughout the duration, but the Ireland left side will still be giving up over 40kg on one side of the set-piece.
The other issue is more nuanced, and linked to the need to keep all eight forwards committed to pushing throughout the process.
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) November 23, 2025
In this example, there is an excuse. Ireland are a couple of defenders short with two men off the field on a yellow card, and the ripple effect is to deprive their half-back of cover when Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu finds himself in an eminently winnable one-on-one contest with Jamison Gibson-Park.
Against the La Rochelle there was no such excuse, but the same problem recurred with a full complement of players on both sides.
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) January 11, 2026
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) January 11, 2026
With Josh van der Flier [in the red hat] nailed to the side of the scrum to hold the weight coming through from the visitors, a gap materialises between him and Gibson-Park in defence – one which 20-year old Maritimes centre Simeli Daunivucu is well-equipped to exploit. Joe McCarthy was lucky not to be yellow-carded for ‘lazy running’ in defence on the next phase of play.
In the second instance, the young flyer identifies the same space in between the Leinster seven and nine to make a carbon copy break downfield. Give Yoram Moefana or Nicolas Depoortère or Kalvin Gourgues the same opportunity and they will not miss it. Never give a vampire the scent of blood.
In just over two weeks, Ireland will discover whether their scrum is up to scratch against Atonio and company; whether the demons of 22 November have been fully banished, or all their worst premonitions come true at the Six Nations. They can do themselves a huge favour in selection by moving Porter back to his original position.
If Ireland’s scrum fails, the domino effect is seismic and profound. It will ripple out into disciplinary issues in all areas of contact and into defensive problems around seven and nine at the set-piece. There may be only an average of a dozen scrums per match in the current game but it is as true now as it was back in the day: no scrum, no win.
All due respect Nick, which is heaps, this is one where I think you're just wrong in the first half of the article. Porter is nowhere near Du Toit level scrumwise.
Like Ethan De Groot he's a good hard solid defender around the park but a mediocre scrummager for an international LH. He's a more honest one in that he doesn't play any tricks and actually tries to outmuscle his opponent but he does so on flagrant angles often and it so rarely succeeds.
Granted, apart from Ox I don't think there are any great scrummaging LHs about now that Marler is gone.
There. Sticking my neck out against the expert.
In terms of his ability to play both sides, I’d say they are roughly on a par. Maybe The Tank ahead on pure scrumming but AP has tremendous work rate around the park in that old Leinster offence. He and Tadhg F used to get through a mountain of work in multi-phase.
But ppl forget that Ports was the second Lions THP on the Covid tour to SA back in 2021, how many props have been selected to diff Lions tours as first a THP, then on the other side?
Even Fran Cotton was picked as a LHP ot South Africa in 74 before moving across to the other side for the Tests! so it’s quite an unique story of adaptability.