Its been getting worse for years, but now the scrum seems to be dominating rugby games in the northern hemisphere, and not for the better. Saturday's showing at Murrayfield where Scotland hosted the Welsh was the perfect anti-advert for the game, principally because of the scrum.
There were two specific problems on show on Saturday, the first being the blight of most games - the reset scrum.
It's not uncommon now to see a scrum being reset 4 or 5 times before a referee takes the opportunity to award a free kick or penalty. The upshots are the time taken out of the game (31 minutes of Scotland vs Wales wsa taken up when the ball was not in play) and the resultant mess it leaves the field in. In wet conditions, such as they were in Dublin on Saturday, the pitch resembles more of a quagmire than a beautiful baize by halftime. The pitch at the Aviva was severely cut up, and not for the first time.
Scrum time at Murrayfield was a mess
The second issue, and this is more a technical point that caught out the Scots particularly at the weekend, is the early engagement.
I have to confess I almost broke my iPad as I sat there watching Scotland win an attacking scrum on the Welsh five metre line after some excellent work from Duncan Weir, only to give away a free kick for the early engagement, something they had been warned about several times before by referee Craig Joubert. The iPad survived it's launch across the room. My patience didn't.
Is it indiscipline from the Scottish front row? Yes, it is. There should be no excuse for engaging the hit early so long as the referee is consistent with the calling of 'crouch', 'touch' and then 'set'.
Having said that, the whole problem is borne out of an eagerness to get the upper hand in the scrum prior to the ball even entering. For an attacking scrum, as it was pointed out by Brian Moore in commentary on Saturday in Ireland, a pack is essentially only pushing with 7 men as the hooker is prioritising the strike of the ball. To get the ascendancy and forward momentum is therefore key.
Scotland's eagerness to get the upper hand on a Welsh front 5 that destroyed the Italians a fortnight before, was clearly a prescribed tactic, but they couldn't get it right. It got to the point in the second half when they were warned for the umpteenth time and threatened with a yellow card that inexplicably never came, the Scots didn't engage at all, the Welsh actually went early and Craig Joubert saw nothing wrong with it.
Joubert's performance has been much maligned during the game and since the final whistle. I actually thought he was not too bad. Vocal and generally fair to either side, his biggest mistake was not to punish the Scottish front row early on for repetitive infringements. With a man down, and hopefully a lesson learnt, the scrum shouldn't have plagued the remainder of the game.
So what to do about the scrum?
The obvious answer, and it was suggested many times through commentary and around the social networks over the weekend, is to not allow any pushing until the ball is in the scrum. It would eradicate the need to gain the ascendancy before the ball is even in play and by default, the early engagement.
It would also allow proper competition between hookers and address the ignored issue of squint feeding from scrum halves, whose antics at scrum time are all to often overlooked by the referee and touch judges.
I'm no expert on the scrum, there are few who could claim to be any such thing. However, what is clear to all rugby fans is the blight on the game that it has become. It kills games, simple as that.
The penalty count on Saturday at Murrayfield was astronomical, with 18 attempts at kickable penalties and many more awarded besides. Many were given away at scrum time. No game in the history of rugby has seen as many points garnered from penalty kicks as that one. If you thought the scrums killed time in the game, an unconfirmed stat highlighted that Leigh Halfpenny took over 16 minutes to take 11 shots at goal. The Murrayfield crowd made their thoughts clear about his taking time at every kick it seemed.
All 31 people on the park on Saturday in Edinburgh contributed to a poor game in some form. Some did more besides to set themselves apart from the majority, a resurgent Sam Warburton amongst them.
Scotland especially have to look at their penalty concession stats. They have given away 63 penalties in 4 games, including 16 on Saturday. Wales didn't have a great game, because they didn't have to. Scotland are doing a fine job at beating themselves, and it has to stop, starting in Paris on Saturday.
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