Patrick, this is an area of the game I have spent most of the pre-season and past 3 months rueing over. The 2 thoughts I have are:

1. Do we contest
2. Do we make a token contest, then do nothing

One of the laws of the game I looked at is 'where is the offside line?' both at the throw and once the ball has been gathered. This drew me to laws 19.12(b) 'participating players'. There are 2 separate offside lines (parallel to the goal lines) before the ball is put in. One line applies to the participating players, plus the SH. The other OS line is for those not participating. Until the ball is thrown in and touches a player or the ground, the offside line is the line of touch i.e. where the ball was kicked into touch. After that, the ball becomes the offside line.

This lead me to the question, 'why contest the put in and proceeding set up of the maul?'. If we contest then bind to the oppos drive, then we have abide by the laws of the maul i.e. back foot, which will put us some distance from the ball.

So, it seemed simple.....If we just put up a token contest for the put in and took no part in the the oppos set and drive, no maul is formed, then the ball remains the offside line. The moment our 2 'stand off' players saw the ball at the back, they would just move forward and tackle the oppo rear man, 1 taking the man the other wrestling the ball. So long as we tackled from in front of the ball, neither would be coming from an offside position. And to top it, if we didn't see the ball at the rear, the opposition would be penalised for truck and trailer.

We'd looked at this and how we could develop it, and we ended up managing to rip the ball (oppo holding on was another issue that benefitted us) and running 4 forwards against the oppo BSW. We became adept and decided to put practice to a match. The main thing was that we would act it out from within their 22.

What was the result?

We assumed that the ref may see that we've come from an offside position so our captain and pack leader informed him of the ploy. He agreed he would look out for it and act accordingly, so long as we remained within the law. We were given the opportunity to use it early in the 1st half. We chatted as though we knew there'd called a rear ball to put pressure on a front ball put in, we put up a token contest at the front, got the front jumper down quick, the 2 lifters then shifted aside and weren't drawn in, the jumper stood away quick, they set a drive early and shifted the ball quick assuming position for a maul, the drive went past our defence and we tackled the rear player, ripped the ball and attacked the 15m channel before going over for a try. The oppo reaction (players & coach) was to stand still lambast the ref (soccer style) for what they thought was offside, they didn't defend our attack and it set the tone for the rest of the game. Most decisions went against them, we were in ascendancy in both the scrums and the lineout as we were seen as the attacking side.

I would advise that you don't use this until all lineout players have practiced all positions of this move.

Hope this helps......