Tony

It will be difficult for your front row if they lack experience but here is the information you need to help them understand what is happening and how to stop it happening:

Scrum Wheeling

A legal wheel involves all players remaining in a pushing position. This can be gauged through the hips of the players and whether they remain together throughout the duration of the scrum.

A wheel can occur through the following means:

• Through the natural wheel of the scrum (caused by the loose heads)
• Through good scrummaging getting the loose or tight side up whilst remaining in a pushing position
• Through defending tight head backing away and not remaining in a strong pushing position creating an opposition or attacking team loose head wheel (illegal)
• Through defending loose head separating hips from hooker and moving the scrum around creating a loose head up style wheel (illegal)
• Through a “whip wheel”. All players from the wheeling side involved in the scrum stepping quickly to the side to create the required momentum to wheel the scrum (illegal)

Countering the wheel

Throughout the wheel at some point the opposition (defending team) is going to move out of a strong driving position in order create the wheel. At this point the attacking team should look to drive through the wheeling (defending) scrum countering the wheel by keeping their hips and shoulders facing down the field.

The wheel may also be countered through stepping with the wheel. For example if team A is trying to create a loose head (getting its left hand side up) team B can counter this by stepping right (to the tight head side). This will move the entire scrum to the right negating the wheel.

This can be very difficult to achieve as the wheel can happen (esp.the whip wheel) before this can be achieved.

I suggest you go through the basics using just 3 v 3 and then gradually move to 5 v 5 and eventually 8 v 8. At all times you should control the speed and pressure used during the practise session as the wheeling scrum is a most dangerous situation!

I hope this helps

Simon