Rugby's endless scrum resets are wasting more time than they're preventing injuries

The engagement sequence rugby uses to set a scrum exists for a real reason, reduce the impact force between two packs so front rows aren't collapsing into each other at full speed. Nobody's arguing against that safety goal. But watch any Test match now and you'll see scrum after scrum reset two, three, sometimes four times before the ball actually goes in, each reset eating another twenty or thirty seconds of dead time while nothing happens. The sequence was supposed to make scrums safer and more stable, and on the injury side it probably has. What it hasn't done is stay proportionate to the problem. A front row that's going to collapse a scrum tends to do it regardless of how careful the engagement call is, and referees have started treating repeated resets as just a normal part of the process rather than the disruption it actually is. A match that should take eighty minutes of actual rugby now regularly runs well past a hundred minutes of clock time, most of it added by set-piece resets, not injuries or genuine stoppages. If the safety benefit has plateaued, and I think the data suggests it has, the honest move is capping resets hard and living with whatever scrums happen after that, not treating unlimited resets as a permanent fixture. The Roar's breakdown of the scrum problem covers the engagement sequence this whole debate is actually about.