Boost effectiveness of your tight-head prop

You don’t always need to have the biggest players in your pack to be successful.

Technique and power can compensate for lack of size, as we proved at the 2011 World Cup.

The French props were among the smallest there, but I boosted our success rate in two simple ways.

The first was to get the props scrummaging without a hooker in training, to see if they were in the correct body shape (see the first of two illustrations). 

If the tight-head prop is not straight, we quickly see their problem. When I was coaching this technique to some experienced props in Argentina, one asked me to translate this into English twice, because they did not believe I wanted them to do it.

Sometimes in training sessions, I even asked players not to bind onto each other across the rows. We can then correct bad body positions more easily. 

When I first introduced this idea, the players were amazed. However, they soon understood the reasoning.

Before a tight-head binds onto the hooker, they have to consider their own body position when engaging with the opposition. There is a danger that, in trying to bind tightly to the hooker, they lose their shape. I like to take the All Black approach – body position comes first, then the bind.

Since the tight-head bind on the hooker is the most important (they face two players, unlike the loose-head), they should bind first. 

My second tweak is for the tight-head prop to bind onto the shorts of the hooker and the loose-head onto the jersey (see the second illustration).

Get props to engage without a hooker to diagnose any faults in body shape

Tight-head grabs the top of the hooker’s shorts; loose-head grabs the hooker’s shirt

Pick the right prop for the job