It has ceased to even be the elephant in the room. There’s no hiding from it any more. The scrum has become an Achilles heel in Irish rugby, and it’s not just the international team, it is the provinces as well. It is as if everywhere you look an Irish scrum is going backwards, or airborne, or both.
One thinks back to Leinster’s early season games in South Africa. Or the carnage wreaked upon the Irish scrum by the Springboks in November. Or the indignity heaped upon John Ryan when given a helicopter view of Bath in the Rec, or Lions frontrowers Tadhg Furlong and Dan Sheehan “getting their wings” as Andy Farrell put it last Saturday.
“A few Aer Lingus flights,” admits David Kilcoyne, who had some fun at his former team-mates’ expense on his podcast, The Rugby Ruck, earlier this week. “And I’m not flying till one o’clock tomorrow”, added the former Munster loosehead, who played 220 times for Munster and 56 times for Ireland in reference to his flight to London.
We meet in the Ballsbridge cafe Mister Magpie on Wednesday, across the road from where he works in aircraft leasing from his office in Aergo Capital, two days ahead of him playing in the Legends match on Friday night in The Stoop, in aid of the Lewis Moody Foundation.
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“I think you have to take them all individually. Look at the South Africa game,” he says, starting with the 24-13 loss last November when Ireland conceded six scrum penalties, one of which was a penalty try, and which accounted for two of their four yellow cards.
“I don’t think you can compare any team in the world with the South African scrum. I’ve been coached under Rassie [Erasmus] and Daan Human, the [Boks] scrum coach. The scrum is the heartbeat of their game.
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“It’s always been a South African way, but then you get an unbelievable coach, Rassie, who identifies a perceived weakness in other teams. He’s going to play to their strengths and he’s built an army now, of tightheads and looseheads,” adds Kilcoyne, pointing to the absence of Frans Malherbe and Vincent Koch from the November tour and the loss of Ox Nché in the opening game against Japan. Yet they still had Wilco Louw, Thomas du Toit, Neethling Fouché and Asenathi Ntlabakanye, with Erasmus also promoting the under-20 prop who won his first three caps on that tour.
Against France, Kilcoyne says that Ireland played poorly despite their set-piece holding up well.
“I actually thought the lads acquitted themselves quite well and [Michael] Milne did very well off the bench, added a lot of impact as well around the park, which I was excited to see.
“They changed it then the following week, I wasn’t quite sure why,” adds Kilcoyne with regard to bringing in the Ulster tighthead Tom O’Toole as loosehead cover instead of Milne.
Kilcoyne understands the idea of a hybrid prop freeing up a squad place at the World Cup. “But it’s very hard to go playing tighthead one week, and then going to loosehead another week, and chopping and changing in mid-season, especially as Ireland have a lot of looseheads at the moment, but we’ve been decimated through injury. It doesn’t fully make sense to me.”
Reflecting on Last Saturday, Kilcoyne draws on his experience of scrummaging against Simone Ferrari.
“He’s a wily old character and he causes a lot of problems. He’s a great scrummager, and he always has been. His name may be Ferrari, but he doesn’t scrum straight. He was always going to be a tricky customer.”
Kilcoyne also believes Furlong remains one of the best tightheads in the world.
“I know he got wings last weekend, but that was one scrum and no one will be harder on him than Tadhg himself, and he also has the strength of character and confidence to dial it in this week.
“You can get caught. Tadhg was fresh on, he was blowing; that little shock in your first game back. Everyone gets it, no matter how seasoned a campaigner you are.”
Kilcoyne cites the emergence of Paddy McCarthy and a tighthead lock in Edwin Edogbo as two plusses.
Like pretty much everyone else, Kilcoyne has huge hopes for McCarthy and along with Edogbo, says: “There’s small little wins in this transitionary phase, but two very important ones.”
Another is Thomas Clarkson, whom Kilcoyne says has added bulk, is dynamic and has clearly learned from Rabah Slimani, much as BJ Botha was the biggest playing influence on his own career during the South African prop’s time at Munster. He welcomes the decision by the IRFU performance manager David Humphreys to relent on the provinces signing overseas props and also cites the AIL as an invaluable breeding ground for frontrow forwards, above all after coming out of the schools system where there is a one-and-a-half metre scrummaging rule.
Kilcoyne stresses that time for scrummaging sessions is limited in any match week, be it for a province or Ireland, and that the plan for any given game will be devised more on “a massive amount of video analysis” and on meetings between the frontrowers and the Ireland scrum coach John Fogarty.
The English frontrow is comprised of Ellis Genge, Luke Cowan-Dickie and Joe Heyes, against whom Kilcoyne had many good battles and whom he describes as another strong and tricky scrummager.
“It’s going to be a bigger battle and now you’re going against a wounded England, who are going to come out of the traps and like to assert their dominance at Twickenham.
“I’ve played over there, against an English scrum, and if you thought last week was hard, this week is going to be an awful lot harder. But hopefully lessons have been learned and I’m sure ‘Fogs’ and Paulie [O’Connell] will have a plan, and they’re going to be ultra paranoid about the set-piece this weekend.”
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Technically, the Italian scrum driving Furlong and Sheehan up and off the ground last week was illegal according to World Rugby’s Law 19.39, namely dangerous play in a scrum, which includes section c: “Intentionally lifting an opponent off their feet or forcing them upwards out of the scrum.”
Be that as it may, Kilcoyne counters: “Yeah, but there’s also an unwritten law, what it does physically and mentally to the other team, and it destroys them.
“So, I would gladly take that penalty, every day of the week, and I know Rassie Erasmus would. You’ve laid down a marker and broken your opponents’ spirit,” says Kilcoyne, who also stresses that the Irish scrum has gone well against South Africa in several past meetings, not least the World Cup.
“We had a really good game plan against their scrum and we got a penalty, under the sticks, against them. And it was a massive point in the game, but, we knew the pictures they [officials] were looking for. So, perception’s reality, and I think it’s very important, this week, to paint a good picture at the first scrum, with real discipline and shown an ambition to go forward, because refs are human.”
At heart, as well as a numbers and size deficit, unlike South Africa, France, Italy and England, Irish rugby lacks “a scrum culture”, especially since Roly Meates was in his pomp. And it tell us much that Meates stood out like a sore thumb for having such a passion for the scrum.
The good news is that Séamus Toomey is endeavouring to inject Irish rugby with a scrum culture, though like all these things this is not an overnight fix.
Toomey joined Blackrock College in September 2011 before being appointed by Humphreys as the IRFU’s full-time performance pathway scrum coach in January 2025. Well, better late than never.
In Toomey’s time with Blackrock, the school produced Oli Jager, Jeremy Loughman, Thomas Clarkson, Gus McCarthy and Paddy McCarthy, as well as Leinster’s ex-Ireland under-20 tighthead Niall Smyth, for whom there are high hopes, and likewise for the current Irish under-20s captain, tighthead Sami Bishti, among others.
As well as now overseeing the pathway through the under-18s, 19s and 20s, Toomey is the coach for the latter and has brought in former Connacht prop Brett Wilkinson as the Irish Under-18s scrum coach and the former Ulster schools and Bath hooker Niall Annett as the Under-19s scrum coach.
“Niall came into Ulster as an EPDO (elite player development officer) last July,” says Toomey. “He’s just finished playing in Bath, where he won a Challenge Cup last season. He’s a good man. He’s got good playing experience and he’s a good technical coach, and he’s starting out in his coaching journey.
“Brett played for Ealing Trailfinders and Connacht, where he’s now a provincial talent coach down in Connacht. Brett is the Irish 18s scrum coach, and I support him as well.
“Myself and Brett and Niall are aligned,” says Toomey, a passionate advocate of developing a scrum culture in Ireland.
“I am fully convinced we can compete against South Africa, England, France, all of them. But we need to be technically excellent, number one,” says Toomey.
To that end, and working alongside Ireland Under-20 and pathway lead physiotherapist Eoin Power, he has introduced “a scrum club” for all national camps for the Irish under-18s, 19s and 20s forwards, in which the back five forwards are just as important as the frontrowers.
All these “scrum club” sessions are videotaped and made available to the players to review in their own time on the Hudl platform.
Their work is already bearing fruit. The Ireland Under-20s had two scrums on their own put-in against their French counterparts in Perpignan two weeks ago. Both were rock solid and they won a penalty on the second before the French got on top after the customary changes in the second half.
But against Italy last week, in the 56th minute the Irish pack won a scrum penalty with seven against eight which was a key turning point in the match and earned a second on the Italian put-in in the last 10 minutes.
As for the bigger picture, Kilcoyne is adamantly opposed to any moves to rid rugby union of the scrum or depower it like in rugby league.
“It’s a magnificent thing, unique. Look at the athletes it breeds. It makes the whole game interesting. It caters for every type of athlete and person. It’s part of what probably makes rugby beautiful.
“So, no scrum, no win.”
