The scrum remains a difficulty for the USA Men’s National Team, and they’ve been working hard at it this week; and the message is, scrum all the way.

“We have to keep up the pressure,” said Scott LaValla, who started at lock last week but moves to flanker this week. “We’re fine with the initial hit, but we’re not staying with it. We’re getting manipulated. For the back row we need to stay down - we were popping up too much worrying about what was going on rather than the task at hand.”

Prop Nick Wallace concurred.

“We can hold our own in the scrum,” said Wallace. “But we need to scrum for all of it, even if it lasts ten, 12 seconds. We know what it takes, we just have to put the work in.”

Wallace stopped short of agreeing with LaValla that the flankers needed to do more. But, what he did say was interesting:

“The flankers are in a difficult position because they know if something happens they need to off fast,” said the prop. “But at the same time it makes a big difference when they are able to push hard.”

The forwards did plenty if live scrummaging this week, and while it’s normal for an international team to tone down the contact in the third week of an assembly, the Eagles have been working hard, and especially hard at the scrum.

“We need to take the scrum as the threat it is,” said LaValla. “We are losing matches because we don’t have that squared up.”