Hendrik Cronjé

Bloemfontein – The South African Rugby Union (SARU) took its first step towards establishing a scrum factory in Johannesburg last week.

About 12 heavyweights, including Balie Swart, Os du Randt, Toks van der Linde, Robbie Kempson, Eddie Andrews and Dougie Heymans, will have the task of ensuring that South African teams start dominating in the scrums again like they did in years gone by.

South Africa’s poor scrumming on their tour of Europe at the end of last year led to the establishment of a group of scrumming coaches.

The South African teams are also not dominating in the same manner as before at Super 14 level and Springbok rugby has lost its trademark powerful scrum.

Os du Randt and Co already started planning the way forward for scrumming at SARU’s meeting.

It was decided that the former props would not only impart their knowledge to senior teams, but all the way down to under-11 level.

“The basic principles have to be written down. We will write a manual about scrumming so that South African rugby has uniform guidelines that can be used from primary school through to international level,” said Heymans.

Du Randt has previously spoken about the need for a national scrum factory.

However, SARU have now got the ball rolling under their manager of game development Hilton Adonis, who convened the meeting.

Former referees such as André Watson and Tappe Henning also attended the meeting in Johannesburg.

Watson had earlier called on Swart to give South African referees some guidance on the scrums.