Why engine-room mastery drives world domination charge

Brian Ashton, the England coach, played his rugby as a scrum-half and has spent the last 20 years inspiring generations of backs to attack space, make the ball do the work and revel in the glories of self-expression. Yet he also understands that in the union code, there is no beauty without the beast.

The beast can be found in all the forward-dominated areas of the game – at the line-out, at the ruck, at the maul – but it lives in the scrum. It was there that England beat the Wallabies on Saturday, just as they beat them in the World Cup final in 2003 and at Twickenham in the autumn of 2005.

"The scrum was vital to us," Ashton said afterwards. "Not just in terms of controlling possession, but in other key areas." It was an illuminating comment.

In the purely practical, measurable sense, the Wallabies lost two of their nine put-ins and conceded five of the 12 penalties and free kicks awarded against them at the set-piece. At international level, in a game of this magnitude, those figures were calamitous. What was more, Australia's reluctance to engage at the scrum and their desperate tactic of collapsing after the initial hit, cost them precious minutes at the end of the match.

But that is less than half the story, for there is an unmeasurable dimension that counts for far more.

Scrummaging is the very core of the union game. Dominance in this department not only gives the superior pack a strong psychological advantage, but it saps the spirit of the inferior side.

Rugby played on the front foot is a joy; rugby played on the back foot is a living hell. The efforts of Andrew Sheridan and company left the Australia forwards feeling over-matched. If winning is a frame of mind, the Wallabies were losers almost from the start.