GETHIN Jenkins has blamed the referee for Wales’ scrum woes in last week’s defeat to England, writes Andrew Penman.

Both Jenkins and Samson Lee were heavily penalised by French referee Jerome Garces during the RBS Six Nations opener at the Millennium Stadium.

And the resulting kicks cost Wales points, field position and territory as England sealed a 21-16 victory.

Ahead of Sunday’s trip to Scotland, Jenkins denied that the Welsh scrum was dominated by the English but said officials need to be more consistent in their interpretation of the scrummaging laws.

“We didn’t do too well in the first scrum and Toby did well to get it out of there but I don’t think we got shunted back apart from that,” said the Cardiff Blues loosehead prop.

“A lot of them went down and a lot of them weren’t stable.

“Two decisions went against me but we got two back against them.

“It’s frustrating the scrum is not stable and we haven’t actually got a platform to push against each other. “There’s a lot of chat from referees on what they want and we are trying our best to get to that level,” he added.

“It’s just a case of when you get out there on the field it’s actually policed in that way and hopefully it’s a steady scrum for the ball to be put in.

“You go into a game wanting to have a battle against your opposite number in a fair and physical way.

“Sometimes I find that’s not going to happen because of the opposition attitude or the way the referee is policing it.

“Hopefully you can get all the referees on the same sort of wave-length so we can adapt to the same thing.”

Jenkins does admit, however, that the referees have a difficult task to control the scrum.

“It’s a tough job for the referee to know what’s happening,” he said.

“I don’t know why some go down, sometimes you’ll go through a game with only one scrum but in some games it will turn it into a mess.

“It’s up to the players, if they have the responsibility to keep it up but if one side is trying something different then that’s where the referee has to be qualified enough to know what is going on.”