A couple of weeks ago, Cian Healy was kicking a ball around on his day off when he was cornered by a group of kids, eager for a few minutes of his time. No problem. He is always helpful in this regard, probably because there is much of the big kid in him still. They asked the usual stuff. Then one of them asked had he enjoyed the Heineken Cup quarter-final against Clermont. Without pausing for a second, Healy responded: "I didn't like sitting on the bench too much."

At least that night he had come on and got to finish the game. Last weekend in Toulouse, the sight of Healy sitting down well ahead of schedule was one of the enduring images of the weekend. Another came the next afternoon in San Sebastian: John Hayes, typically stoic, in sharp focus, as yet another scrum had been busted with the prospect of more to come.

Perhaps the most poignant however came in the immediate aftermath of that game, always the most fertile period for getting Ronan O'Gara as he is. He had to abandon the piece with the man from Sky for fear tears might take over. Had Munster been whopped by 30 you reckon O'Gara could have coped with it, but he knew they had been beaten by a team nowhere near as good as the one they had buried in the 2006 final. If you were 23, that would be deeply frustrating. Add 10 years and it's enough to make you weep.

When you get to O'Gara's stage of the game, days like this tick by slowly. This experience would have been torture for him: the clock running down, the game staying at that same frustrating, deadening pace; and Munster having an out-of-body experience where they were witnesses to their own burial.

The Reds hadn't even made it to the plane when back in Ireland a cloud of unease had spread over the country with volcanic efficiency. We're grounded.

* * * * *

It started in the first few minutes in Le Stadium on the Saturday. Toulouse had a defensive scrum close to their own line. And they attacked. This is not normal. An Irish side in this situation will look to batten down the hatch and open it only when the danger has cleared. Toulouse, however, wanted to make a statement. That statement was clear and unambiguous and the away team knew that every scrum thereafter was going to be a threatening experience.

With barely half an hour gone, Cian Healy was called ashore. It wasn't as dramatic as Declan Kidney's reaction in Kingsholm two years ago when Tony Buckley was under the cosh from Carlos Nieto, but it registered with everybody in that heaving stadium. It didn't have much positive effect though. For the rest of the day, Leinster played musical chairs across their front row but they were always looking for a seat when the music stopped.

Typically, Leinster's plan is to shuffle their props around, playing fast and loose with the laws on replacing injured players, and nobody picks them up on it. They needed something more dramatic to get them out of this mess.

Compared to what happened in San Sebastian the next day, however, it was mild discomfort. Including resets there were 33 scrums in the second semi-final, 17 of them on Munster's put-in. This is well above the average where, in last year's Six Nations for example, a team could expect to feed only eight scrums (excluding resets -- see panel). There is some irony in it too, for the wretched handling of Ayoola Erinle and Iain Balshaw contributed to Munster's high number of put-ins.

Of that 17, five were collapsed or popped up, six were taken apart, three yielded penalties to Munster and three provided ball that was usable. Of the three that were usable, you wouldn't say any of them was top quality. It's hard to conceive of a situation where a team of Munster's experience could go through 80 minutes without getting any Grade A ball off their set-scrum.

Their lineout was better, but only relatively. They lost four --two of them down to Biarritz infringements which weren't picked up -- and only eight of the remainder would you class as premium quality. So between scrum and lineout Munster had less than a dozen deliveries they would have ordered beforehand. The rest came unsolicited and with prohibitive charges attached.

Now you understand how Biarritz managed to win. The Basques were ordinary in everything bar the grunt of their pack and the shot-selection of Dimitri Yachvili who Munster singularly failed to molest. And man did he need some heavy handling.

Combined with Connacht's forward-driven defeat by Toulon on the Friday night, the weekend package presented an image of Ireland as a land of little people who can't hack the hard stuff up front. Well, specifically, that we can't scrummage. We can. It's just that we don't invest a lot of time in it.

Leinster, for example, don't have a slot dedicated solely to scrummaging each week, unlike the lineout. And while Reggie Corrigan is scouring the province looking for and trying to develop the next generation, working week in week out with the current generation is not his responsibility.

Munster pack down every week (as do Ulster) under Paul McCarthy and Laurie Fisher but maybe they need to do it more often because culturally we are not a nation of scrummagers. We don't produce genetically disposed models like South Africa, or Argentina, who tend not to be as big as the Boks but raise their young on stories of the scrum. Neither do the French have it over us genetically but they have a tradition of scrummaging until they drop, and they have the numbers to provide depth, even allowing for all the overseas players in their domestic game.

The stats haven't forced us to change our culture either. At an average of only eight feeds per Test, why would you bother?

Eh, because it matters -- even on the days when it's dry and the error count is low and the average is not exceeded by much. And when it is, then you can end up with the carnage we witnessed in France last weekend.

We are not alone in feeling like this. Australia, who tend to be ahead of us in most respects in rugby, had their public humiliation in mid-decade and are now out the far side of it. They will go to the World Cup next year with a scrum that will cope on the average days and excel on those when the set-pieces are more plentiful. Remember Twickenham in November 2005? You could hear the cackling all the way over here as England shunted the Wallabies around the park like a clapped-out motor. 'Sorry lads, you can't park here.' Hee hee. Shunt. Current hooker Stephen Moore was on that tour (as a 22-year-old, interestingly enough) but safely removed from the action.

"Every time we play there now that particular game is always brought up," he says. "But the last couple of years we've tried to put that right. It's taken us probably until now to get our credibility back. Certainly at Twickenham.

"The first thing was having to go through something like that and it put scrummaging at the forefront for us. It became an issue we had to deal with, so it was plain and simple. It was a real area we moved to address and you could say that since then it's steadily got better and better for us.

"There were a couple of reasons for it: first the coaching we had along the way was excellent from guys like Michael Foley; and second we had a group of young guys there who learned a good bit through that period and stayed in the system for a number of years. I'd say the depth of front-rowers in Australia at the moment is probably as good as it's been for a long time."

They had an obvious advantage in that, at the time, virtually all of the pro players in the country were Australia-qualified, unlike here where getting Irish players into position is a battle in itself, before you even get to conditioning them suitable for that position.

Notwithstanding that, it wasn't as simple as identifying the issue and fixing it. Two years after that humiliation in Twickenham, they were on the wrong end of the English front row again, this time in the World Cup semi-final. Now, this was one of those games where you went away thinking that one team had spent the entire day in reverse gear. It illustrates the power of the scrum still in rugby in its ability to create the perception of total superiority.

Certainly the Wallabies were embarrassed. "That day England just put the cleaners through us and that can happen," Moore says.

"At that stage, New Zealand were a dominant scrummaging team and we'd done well in some really tough games against them, but that day against England we just got smashed and that was it."

But not smashed all the time. There were only 14 scrums (excluding resets) in the whole game. So while that figure was put in the shade by the number of lineouts, and dwarfed by the number of breakdowns, the psychological impact of giving the Aussies a good seeing-to in the scrum was enormous for what was an ordinary England team.

When you ask Moore if he thinks it's too late for Ireland at the World Cup next year, he answers with great diplomacy and says it's just a case of finding someone to complement Hayes and Marcus Horan and Cian Healy. "I think certainly it's something that Ireland have struggled with. You talk about tight-head props and you'd have numerous guys who have played there for France over the past number of years and you'd probably say there's only John Hayes who has played for Ireland over that period. The whole load has been left to him at international level and it hasn't been that much different on the other side with Marcus Horan.

"I guess there hasn't been that emergence or turnover of front-rowers there. I know Cian Healy's come on the scene now and he's an outstanding player who's going to get better. He probably didn't have his best day the other day in the scrum but him emerging is a big positive."

In truth, we're talking about doing a makeover in Ireland over the next year and a half, for there will be no bolters. That will mean Declan Kidney and Gert Smal impressing on the provinces the need to find extra time in their working week to devote to scrum work. It's in everybody's interest.

Moreover, it might be useful to return to the idea of props as props. When Mike Ross was in Harlequins last season, where he was their starting tight-head, pretty much all they wanted him to do was scrummage and lift and clean out rucks. They picked him for what he was good at and worked on improving the other bits.

When he came to Leinster, however, he was sidelined because there didn't seem to be much of a premium on what he does best. And his other bits were not very good. When you make mistakes in open field, then the whole world sees them and people form the impression that you're not up to it. But in Ross's case this was like losing patience with a hod carrier for slurping his tea.

Clearly he needs to develop his game but equally Ireland need to develop more grunt. Our exposure last weekend was acute because it was a trio of French teams, each with a powerful scrum, who were lined up in opposition. Our World Cup programme will take us up against teams who take this phase more seriously than us -- Australia, Italy and South Africa, if the form book reads right. So while our world wasn't ended by what happened last weekend, its shape was altered and not for the better.

* * * * *

Improving our scrum across the board will probably require some further investment, but not much. The issue of how much money can be fed into the game in the future is causing something of a panic in Lansdowne Road at the minute.

With the Aviva Stadium opening its doors this week, the ball hopped by communications minister Eamon Ryan about making the Heineken Cup free to air has the potential to burst on delivery to the IRFU.

They take in €10m-12m annually in tv rights from ERC and the Six Nations. Remove the Sky element of that and you're looking at a wider tv audience watching a game that's just been punctured. True, elsewhere there is harmonious cohabitation between pay per view and free to air in the way the Champions League is broadcast, but that's a massive, pan-European gig as opposed to the Heineken Cup which for all its progress is still a Six Nations affair.

Unless the minister has some incredibly cunning plan that will bring the game to a wider audience without seizing its financial engine, then it won't be long before scrummaging is the least of Cian Healy's worries. His salary will be gone, and the kids who wanted to know what he felt like against Clermont Auvergne will have tuned out of a game where Ireland are no longer competitive.

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