Didn’t the Romans utilize grappling & boarding tactics to defeat the ramming attacks of the Carthaginians? Takes a lot of training to do a successful ramming attack. OTOH, boarding made use of Rome’s best asset... infantry (Marine Infantry in this case).
I think they used a sort of claw to keep the ships engaged.
They did. They also got lucky — a Carthaginian warship had been abandoned and beached in a storm, and the Romans just took it apart and reproduced it board by board, mass-producing it, and creating a huge navy from nothing, practically overnight. They didn’t know the subtle nuances of trireme warfare, so they adapted their land-based tactics, as you noted, grappling and boarding and fighting it as a land battle, and destroyed the Carthaginians where they were supposed to be strongest.
Hannibal cheated. 11 of the 12 elephants were under-inflated.