Kieran Read has weighed in on the Rennie-Erasmus scrum spat, and he's broadly siding with the All Blacks' camp. His core argument: South Africa's tighthead-and-hooker combination shears left deliberately, depowering the All Blacks hooker as the connection point and leaving their tighthead exposed. Read stops short of calling it illegal — he acknowledges it's difficult to penalise and that South Africa have scrummed this way for years — but he's clear that the directional pressure is a tactic, not coincidence. On Erasmus's counter-claim that the All Blacks are causing their own collapsed scrums, Read pushes back, pointing to the height differential: the Boks scrum high, the All Blacks want to go low, and when the two meet slightly off-sync, the scrum collapses — which Read frames as a structural mismatch rather than Bok innocence. He does credit the All Blacks for adjusting between Tests and finding some reward at their own scrum in the second match. For Bok fans, this is a useful technical breakdown of exactly what SA's set-piece is doing and why it's so hard to referee — and why opponents keep complaining about it.