Lessons Learned- Part 2

By Whaley Shark
June 16 2013

Having looked at the off-field dramas of last season a few weeks ago, I thought I’d turn my attention to what happened on the pitch this time. There are three things that stick in my mind from the season just past-

 

 

1. That bloody awful, aimless kicking game. I was very struck by a Pete Anglesea comment, that the ‘water carriers’ spend most of their time on the pitch reminding the players what the game plan is, and it absolutely wasn’t to kick the ball straight to one of the opposition back three and give them a 30 metre run up to bring the ball back. In the hurly burly of a fast paced, intense game, you can imagine the occasional lapse, but surely the point of training all week is to imprint the game plan into the players’ minds so that it doesn’t evaporate under the pressure of a match? So the fact that repeated reminders were needed, and the players still deviated, is very significant to me.

Being sufficiently ancient to have hung up my boots long before the start of professionalism in rugby, I really don’t know how much freedom to play what’s in front of them the players have? But I recall, in the mists of time, being given very clear ‘guidance’ by coaches, and at a much higher level than I ever played at, there are examples in autobiographies- there are very telling anecdotes in both Clive Woodward’s and Austin Healey’s. So my sense is, not much. The coaches will, or will not select you next week, and not doing what you’re told is unlikely to improve your chances of selection. No selection = no profile, no chance of national recognition, possibly reduced (or even no) pay packet. So I think, for a modern professional player, departing from the game plan may well be a last resort. You might do it collectively, especially if you know the coaches can’t replace half the team for the next game, but the main thing it says to me is that the players just didn’t believe in what they were being asked to execute.

And it’s interesting that the aimless kicking diminished once we started to do better. We won a game or two, the players’ faith in the coaches started to return, we kicked less and won more, and reversed the vicious spiral of decline into a virtuous one of improvement. That’s all ‘top two inches’ stuff, and that may have been the biggest positive impact of all the coaching changes we saw in the early winter- the players started to trust the coaches again. So, Lesson One- understand better what the players are thinking, and that may mean being more receptive to debate and criticism. Yes, you’re the coaches, but they have to believe in you in order to play for you, and I think that belief was weakened.

2. The Tuitupou/Leota pairing. It looked pretty robust to me defensively though I, like others here, felt it wasn’t our most creative centre partnership. I’m not sure I take at face value the stats about Sam having the most missed tackles in the AP, because I get the sense that sometimes he was doing other people’s jobs, trying to make tackles he should have been asked to make. But I think the selection was pretty simple- if the opposition don’t score, we won’t lose the game. A defensively sound centre pairing is a good start to preventing them scoring and, when you’re at the bottom of the table, not losing is a pretty important aim.

We clearly have a bunch of very bright prospects in the centre, with lots of attacking potential, but I suspect the judgement was that they were not quite ready for a lot of exposure in the AP, especially in a pressurised relegation dogfight. Will Addison, whose bravery and commitment perhaps outweighs his physical capabilities, is an example. He’s very exciting going forward but has had a tough season with injuries and concussion. Not only that but, as we started to regain confidence as a team, we saw a bit more of what Sam and Johnny could do- they seemed to come out of their shells a bit latterly, so maybe we weren’t seeing everything they could do either.  Lesson Two- we, in the stands, should perhaps cut some of the guys on the field a bit of slack.            

3. The scrum that wasn’t. It’s been said elsewhere on this board, but it doesn’t matter how fearsome your front row is if they aren’t well supported, particularly by their lock forwards. So we should look at the tight five, all together, and then we maybe start to understand just how depleted by injury they were for much of the season. I’m a big Ostrikov fan, and his absence really hurt us in my view. We also now know that Eifion played much of the season injured, and we lost other high quality forwards at times as well. I can’t piece together the whole story but my sense is that we had a significantly weakened pack for much of the season. When we started to get some of the casualties back, we looked much better.

That said, I am not sure we used our pack desperately well in any case. Richie Gray, so destructive in open play, isn’t much use at the bottom of a heap of steaming bodies, or standing a yard out from a ruck, and when we started to deploy him further out, and commit more bodies to the breakdown, we started to be better at retaining the ball, and at doing something productive with it. It looked like a return to rugby basics, but it worked. Lesson Three- make sure we do the simple things well (I was at the Leicester away game, and Tigers did nothing complicated but still contrived to hammer us), and try to improve the strength in depth.

That’s enough rambling for this week. Back in a fortnight’s time with some more……