LONG READ Rugby's Greatest Rivalry deep dive - what has happened to the All Blacks’ scrum?

Twelve months ago almost to the day, New Zealand forwards coach Jason Ryan proclaimed a new era of All Blacks scrummaging. His charges had been caught napping at a late scrum in fortress Eden Park and had been pushed off their own feed at a brisk trot in the first match of a Rugby Championship double-header against the Springboks. On the morning after the ignominy, the last remaining member of Ian Foster’s 2023 World Cup coaching crew explained to the assembled Kiwi media that it was a one-off:

“We just want to get [the ball] out and play to be fair, but there’s one [scrum] where they climbed into us, we lost our footing, tried to get back up, and it was just too late. So that’ll be a ‘never again’ moment.”

Whatever the hair of the dog or the snake oil salesman’s cure, the set-piece headache has lasted considerably longer than one day. The very next week at Wellington’s ‘Cake Tin’, the Kiwi scrum took a few more steps backwards, and the hangover still looms like a black cloud overhead after Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series which finished in Baltimore at the weekend. There is precious little sign of the patient feeling any better, let alone of a full recovery. The New Zealand scrum still needs regular weekly sessions on the ventilator to keep it alive.

It is a wretched, if not entirely unexpected, outcome for one of the top three nations in the world. In a preview of the series, I wrote that the Boks would be looking to maximise penalty advantage from their own scrum feed, and that is where the All Black had to stop them. As every other major tournament across the world has proven repeatedly, ‘dominance’ is a one-way street, and it is all about doing the business on your own feed:

New Zealand’s apparent helplessness on the South African put-in told a worrying story of decline in recent times, and Dave Rennie’s description of the set-piece performance at the post-match presser in Baltimore – “I thought our set-piece was much stronger tonight, and we’ll take a lot of confidence from that” – will concern die-hard All Blacks supporters no end. The All Blacks conceded three penalties and one free-kick at the four scrums when the strongest Springboks combination of Ox Nche, Malcolm Marx and Wilco Louw was on the field. Parity that is not.

Wind the clock back to 2021 for a moment. Subscribers to Sky Sport’s The Breakdown had no hesitation in naming the World Cup-winning trio of Tony Woodcock, Keven Mealamu and Owen Franks to their starting line-up in ‘New Zealand’s Greatest XV’. Who could argue? Between them the trio had racked up 358 national caps, and along with Franks’ predecessor in the No.3 jersey Carl Hayman, they embodied the most stable phase in New Zealand scrummaging history in the 11 years between 2004 and 2015.

Sir Graham Henry had identified a huge improvement in scrum performance as one of the Key Performance Indicators to usher in a new era of national success after the disappointment of a semi-final loss to Eddie Jones’ Wallabies in 2003. Within 12 months his ‘scrum doctor’ Mike Cron upped measurable output on the scum machine from 1200 kgs of force applied, to 2000 kilos. Nobody, not even front-rowers as intimidating as Tendai ‘The Beast’ Mtawarira and Bismarck Du Plessis, would have forced their way into that New Zealand front row at its peak.

How things have changed since Franks’ final game for the All Blacks on 10 August 2019. That date, and South Africa’s withdrawal from Super Rugby the following year, have marked New Zealand’s card at scrum-time. Since then, there has been the drip-drip-drip of a gradual deterioration, culminating in a steady penalty leak last season against both England and the Boks, to the full-scale blow-out in the current RGR series. The scrum dam has finally burst, and now it needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

A deep dive into the All Blacks’ scrum performance over the course of the series first reveals a huge disparity between the stats of the starting front row and the bench unit:

Whatever their starting combination in the front row, the All Blacks were unable to square the circle on a consistent basis. By way of contrast, front-row performance off the bench was far superior, with the finishers apparently solving the problems experienced by the starting unit, even when the Springboks’ ‘strongman’ front row [Nche-Marx-Louw] were switched to the back end of the game in Cape Town. The All Blacks were never less than comfortable at scrum-time in the last half hour.

A reluctance to take action over the under-performance of Codie Taylor and Tyrel Lomax, who both started three of the four Tests, was critical. At the age of 35, the series has turned out to be a bridge too far for Taylor, while Lomax was never able to regain his class-leading form of 2024 after a long injury lay-off. The preview article argued that the 2026 All Blacks needed iron-clad performances from Lomax and his cohorts on the Springbok feed to have a chance of winning the RGR series. That was a non-negotiable. They did not get them.

The only time the starting New Zealand front row was able to operate in something approaching comfort was under the more benign, forgiving scrum gaze of Australian referee Angus Gardner in the second Test, and in opposition to the reserve Springbok unit of Gerhard Steenekamp, Deon Fourie and Thomas Du Toit. 14 of the 15 scrum penalties were given up when the Bok big boys – Nche, Marx and Louw – were starting the game.

An individual analysis based on my own database rating system provides a gloomy short-hand for individual performance:

With all three of their ratings falling in the range between 30 and 40, the starting front row of either Bower or de Groot, Taylor and Lomax has been sub-par for the course. It was the bench front row of Xavier Numia, Asafo Aumua and Fletcher Newell which came closest to producing the stable, ball-using platform at set-piece Rennie has said he wants, and the one New Zealand will need if it is to hoist ‘Bill’ for the fourth time in Australia next November.

The most worrying scrum incident of all occurred outside the Test matches, at the beginning of the second half in the midweek game against the Lions.

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) September 13, 2026

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) August 26, 2026

The Lions front row is the least imposing scrummaging unit among the four URC franchises, featuring three players in S.J Kotze, P.J. Botha and Sebastian Lombard who are unlikely ever to pull on a green-and-gold jersey. That trio was outweighed by over 12 kilos per man by their opponents – Siale Lauaki, Samisoni Taukei’aho and Pasilio Tosi.

On the tight-head side of the All Blacks’ front row, Tosi enjoyed a 30-kilo advantage over Kotze, but none of that advantage is felt throughout a pushover attempt which first slews to the Kiwi right, then walks across the goal-line unopposed after Tosi subsides to the deck. The angle from behind the posts shows that it is ‘walking around’ [Dave] before it becomes ‘scrumming through’ [Rassie], but that is a conversation for another day.

Whatever the technical rights and wrongs of that scrum, the most worrying feature from a Kiwi perspective is that the coaches never looked like finding a fix for it, so the hole in the dyke just kept on growing. The blueprint for the Springbok scrum had been set out as long ago as the France-South Africa game back in November:

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) September 7, 2026

The Springbok tight-head sets up on an angle, Marx shifts over to attack the opposing hooker’s right shoulder and break his bind with the man to his right, the loose-head goes on his ‘walk’, and all of the Bok back-five forwards take a small step to their left before driving straight forward. It was all there, in glaring black and white.

The one scrum where the All Blacks successfully defended the tactic occurred in the only game they won, at the first Test in Ellis Park:

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) August 23, 2026

Aumua blocks Louw successfully, so he cannot penetrate and begins to move sideways rather than forwards. Marx and Steenekamp start dragging or pulling the scrum to the left around Newell on the other side as a result, and the All Blacks win the penalty.

The All Blacks’ scrum performance in the RGR series fell well short of the standards set by the likes of Craig Dowd, Sean Fitzpatrick and Olo Brown at the start of the professional era, and by Woodcock, Mealamu and either Hayman or Franks in the World Cup-winning years. Maybe, one of those twin titans of the past, a Ken Gray or a Kevin Skinner, was needed to steady the ship.

In 1956 New Zealand went to war with South Africa, four years after a tour of the Republic where they had lost all four Test matches and their front-row forwards left the country like sheep, cowed by the strength of the Springboks’ front row. They recalled Skinner, a heavyweight boxer of some renown, and he clipped first Chris Koch, then Jaap Bekker, in short order at the third Test at Christchurch. Koch was on his knees, scrambling to find his front teeth in the Christchurch quag when Skinner proffered a gold ring by way of peace-maker: ‘here, get a couple made from it!’

If New Zealand wants to punch its way out of Springbok scrum domination now, it has to start by developing a new heavyweight tight-head prop over the next 12 months, whether it be Tamaiti Williams or Saula Ma’u. If it means relaxing overseas selection guidance to pluck Sione Ahio from Stade Rochelais in time for the World Cup, set the rulebook aside and get it done. No more games, because this is no longer sport, it is war.