Boyd defends Hurricanes scrum

Cape Town - Hurricanes head coach Chris Boyd has defended his side's set-piece in the wake of the 20-12 defeat to the Crusaders on Saturday.

Despite what looked like a dominant display from the Crusaders in the scrum, Boyd has given reassurance that the statistics show no reason to panic.

"[Scrum coach] Dan Cron went back and looked at our success rate against the Crusaders in the last five years, on our completion rate across the scrum and lineout, and it was within about two per cent of what it normally is," Boyd told Stuff.

"He also had a look at the set-piece completion rate against the Crusaders over the last five games and ours was the best of the last five games.

"So what it tells us is - as you'd expect from a team that's got five All Blacks in the front five and six All Blacks in the pack, and they're probably the All Blacks' starting frontrow if Colesy's [Dane Coles] not right - is that it's not acceptable but [that] we went about how we normally would."

Boyd believes there were a number of 50/50 decisions given against them by Jaco Peyper and this reflected unfairly on his forward pack.

"We didn't necessarily agree with all those decisions," said Boyd.

"I think the way Jaco referees the scrum, he's very focused on the dominant side. The question would be how are they dominant?

"It's not really my area to be honest, but our guys think that we were probably hard done by in probably half of those penalties.

"We don't have to go very far back to where our scrum performed very well against the Brumbies and Waratahs, who were supposed to be really good scrums.

"We got dished up three times in our set-piece last year; the Brumbies, the Reds and the Crusaders and we had really good performances this year against the Reds and the Brumbies, but the Crusaders got on top in that particular area.

"The fact that we also didn't dominate the collision areas, we also didn't dominate the territory and we also had 30 skill-execution mistakes [contributed too]. So I guess the big question we're asking is whether we tried to play too much rugby."