Chiefs coach Clayton McMillan has praised his dominant scrum - and the match officials allowing it to dominate - after their nervous 27-25 victory over Reds at Brisbane.
The set-piece became a focal point of contention, after Chiefs halfback Cortez Ratima scored off a wheeling scrum on halftime, after they repeatedly disintegrated the Queensland pack for scrum penalties.
During this sequence, the Reds also lost the services of powerful prop Taniela Tupou, as they complained the Waikato side were deliberately turning the scrum - but McMillan is adamant his pack doesn't need to cheat.
"We feel like we've got the best scrum in the competition, and we're happy to go there and challenge teams," he said. "I think the referees got it right.
"I know the man in the middle with the whistle will probably get a lot of flack for raising his arm, but if you do a little digging, you'll see it was the blokes on the sideline with the best view in the house calling those penalties.
"There's no need to wheel or play silly buggers when you've got confidence in your scrum. You just scrum square over the ball and be prepared to scrum for as long as the referee will allow you to scrum.
"That was part of our plan against the Reds. They have a good scrum themselves, but we wanted to see whether they were prepared to scrum for longer and as it turns out, sometimes they weren't."
When cross-examined on whether his scrum ever wheeled, McMillan doubled down on the brazen assessment of his forwards.
"We feel like we've got, not just the best scrum, but the two best scrums in the competition. Some of our work in training is harder than we're getting sometimes in games.
"That's not to say there aren't some bloody good scrums out there, but we just don't feel like we have to play silly buggers to get rewarded at scrum-time."
The result catapults the Chiefs back into Super Rugby Pacific playoff contention, leapfrogging the Reds into fourth on the table, behind the Blues, Brumbies and Crusaders, with all three still to play this weekend.
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