CHRIS HEWETT

Welcome to the age of the anti-scrum. We wait whole half-hours for a set-piece only to find none coming along at once, and on the rare occasions when front-rowers go up close and personal, they are constrained by a list of regulations longer than the tax code. As for those No 8-facing No 9s and their skew-whiff feeds – let’s stop now, for sanity’s sake.
Yet, in spite of it all, scrummaging props still find a way to win matches. The latest example? Step forward Dan Cole of Leicester, master of the East Midlands derby.
When poor Emmanuel Iyogun, the young Northampton forward, fi...