Is this the same Mike Cron who ...
A) advocated and coached the scrum hit & chase?
B) has been central to all the other failed scrum tinkerings as part of his IRB lead consultative role- including the current referee decides feed timing !!!
C) said that a 20-25% depowering of the scrum hit would solve the scrum collapse problems
D) that has an obvious NZ bias to scrummaging value
E) agreed that crooked feeding was needed to counter the lost hit/chase that he'd helped develop?
Browner, its really easy to criticise when you
a) know little or nothing about the subject material yourself except what you read on the internet, and
b) make your criticisms entirely out of time and context.
I will now dismantle your criticisms and set a few things straight for you!
A) advocated and coached the scrum hit & chase?
..at a time when hit and chase was advocated by everyone (or at least, everyone who mattered).
You cherry picked a few parts of the whole in order to make your criticism sound plausible (you're good at that, browner, you do it a lot). If you REALLY understood anything at all about scrummaging, you would know that he was right in the context of the rest (the bits you left out). What you fail to understand is that when both scrums hit and chase, they effectively cancel each other out and the result locks the front rows together. Its like following through in a golf swing, or when kicking a ball. The intent to swing the club/leg through past the ball is what creates the timing.
The reason for this is simple dynamics; most scrums at elite level are close to evenly weighted, so when they come together it is with approximately equal force. The initial stability of the scrum is therefore dependent on the total weight of each pack, NOT the collective strength of the participants. You can liken this to two cars having a head on collision. You have similar cars of similar weight heading towards each other at 20 mph. The force with which they crash will be related to the weight of the cars. The fact that one has a 100 hp motor and the other has a 500 hp motor makes no difference to the force of the crash.
B) has been central to all the other failed scrum tinkerings as part of his IRB lead consultative role- including the current referee decides feed timing !!!
...and so have a lot of other scrum coaches, but the problem is, when an expert individual or group come up with a
holistic solution to a problem, the last thing you need is for busybodies, self-professed experts and people with personal or national agendas, and who weren't involved in the evolution of the solution in the first place, to come along afterwards and pick which bits of the solution they want, which bits they don't want and to add bits of their own. A holistic solution (one that is, by definition
"characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole") ought not be tinkered with. The solution that the scrum working group (of which Mike Cron was a part) came up with was a total solution that worked well in the two trial areas mentioned earlier. It was the iRB referees who tinkered with the solution by adding the "Yes9" and in so doing they stuffed the solution up. Just because Cron was a member of the scrum working group DOES NOT MEAN that he agrees with the tinkering that came after the fact.
Now, instead of the misquoted and unrepresentative BS you have posted, lets look at what Cron actually said..
"Enforcing the halfback to put the ball in straight has been one gripe, however. The pedantic nature of some early officiating of this rule caused strong criticism. And it turns out the requirement came as an ‘add-on’ request from the referees. It was not part of the initial recommendations. "The referees have brought in a couple of other things that weren’t in the trial,” Cron revealed. “Telling the halfback when he can feed the scrum was never in the trial. Being very strict in the scrum feed wasn’t in the trial. They were brought in by the referees after it was approved.
That is a long, long way from what you said,
C) said that a 20-25% depowering of the scrum hit would solve the scrum collapse problems
...and it would have if he and the scrum group were listened to instead of the busybodies tinkering with what the group came up with.
The implication from that, of course, is that the reduced power of the hit HAS reduced the number of collapses, and the tighthead binding (which has nothing whatever to do with the hit) is major remaining cause. You will recall that illegal binding, by tightheads especially, is something that I have been banging on about here on this forum, for some time.