Quote: Andy Gilder "The only way Leeds should touch this is if the rules are amended to remove competitive scrums.
If a Union team loses specialist front rowers to injury and are forced to put other players in there, scrums are declared non-competitive on safety grounds. I can't see how it could then be considered "safe" to scrummage against players who have no understanding of how to do so safely.
Removing flankers will actually destabilise the scrums, making them even more unsafe IMO.
At the moment, this is just an approach from Bob Dwyer to see whether Leeds would be interested. I would be surprised if it got much further than that without some serious negotiation on the format of the game taking place.'"
I would expect that the two players to be dropped from the RU side would be the props rather than the flankers which would limit somewhat the bias of the scrum to the RU side.
The fitness required is massively different and they would struggle in RL as much as an RL prop would struggle in RU. RU props simply wouldnt have the defence, the fitness, the ball skills, the speed or agility to even basically function in RL. Similarly no RL player has the sheer strength, power or size to function as an RU prop.
If you tried to play the RU prop in that game, yes they would dominate the scrum, but they wouldnt be able to handle pace of the game, the 10metres, nor would they be able to defend against a player like Burrow, Mcguire, Webb etc on the field with only 13 players, they would get more and more exhausted lessening any impact they would have at the scrum.