Crouch, touch, pause, engage . . . collapse! That seemed to be the message from Murrayfield at the weekend when the Scotland and New Zealand front rows found it impossible to stay on their feet and the referee, Englishman Wayne Barnes, found it impossible to do anything about it.

God knows it was difficult. The modern-day prop may be a slab of muscle weighing in at nearly 20 stone but his fellow forwards are nearly as massive.

His job is to keep his feet while an opposition pack weighing in at close to a ton is trying to make him lose his balance. But not so much that he would fall over – or that's the theory.

A collapsed scrum is highly dangerous and therefore illegal. However, it is widely accepted that, as autumn progresses towards winter and surfaces become increasingly treacherous, the odd scrum will collapse accidentally. But not all of them – or even most of them.

It has long been an accepted part of rugby's rough justice system that sometimes the only way for the referee to avoid having to endlessly restart the set scrum is to issue penalties and warnings, sometimes even if he is not absolutely sure who is to blame.

As a result, rather than risk conceding penalties that could cost their team points and possibly the match, both sets of forwards have tended to concentrate a little bit more on keeping the scrum from collapsing and the game has been allowed to flow.

Not so last weekend. Even though the front row experts in the stands – former Scotland captain David Sole and the more neutral former British Lion Keith Wood – were certain that New Zealand prop Jamie McIntosh was the guilty party, trained barrister Barnes obviously felt he did not have enough evidence to convict.

His reluctance to apportion blame meant that the game stagnated for long periods while the scrums set and reset.

It somehow made a mockery of all those much trumpeted initiatives – going under the names of Experimental Law Variations and protocols – designed to speed up the game, to make it more understandable to the casual observer, and therefore more watchable.

If strict interpretation of existing laws stalls the game for long periods, one wonders what makes the new lawmakers believe that their new guidelines will have the desired effect.

The evidence from the Wales v South Africa match in Cardiff suggests that their tinkering has been both a result of muddled thinking and counterproductive. The protocol that asks referees to police the breakdown more strictly has, it seems, inspired a reluctance to get involved at the tackle area. As a result teams would rather kick the ball then carry it into contact.

The prolonged bouts of aerial ping-pong that marred proceedings at the Millennium Stadium are surely not what the lawmakers had in mind.

But those who come from "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of thought would appear to be in a minority in the game's upper echelons. They seem to be characterised as old school and reactionary, while those in favour of change paint themselves as progressive and modern.

That the former generally come from the northern hemisphere and the latter from below the equator tends to exacerbate the differences, and has already led to veiled threats from Australia, in particular, that if there is not more acceptance of the ELVs in the north, the game is in danger of splitting in two.

Rugby in Australia has its own problems – having to fight its corner against stiff competition from Australian Rules football and rugby league – but it is hard to see why the rest of the world should go as far as changing the way they approach the game in order to prop up Australian Rugby.

Moves to de-power the scrum a few years ago – emanating from Australia and coinciding with that their realisation that they had no front row forwards of international calibre – smacked of self-interest. It is still surely incumbent upon Australia to adapt to the rest of the world rather than the other way around.

England's opponents at Twickenham this weekend have already attempted to divert the flak with another moan. This might be the last time they bring a full strength side to Europe, they claim, if England and the rest of the northern hemisphere continue to send under-strength teams Down Under.

And this is the country that coined the phrase "whingeing Pom"! If England can defeat the Wallabies again, and especially if Andrew Sheridan and his front row colleagues can once again squeeze the life out of their counterparts, there will only be one team to whom the adjective can possibly apply.