During the week I had a fascinating chat with Wendy Buswell about her experiences of adopting her expertise in performance training practice and theory for actors across to the training of rugby players.

I came away from the interview with the strong belief that her ideas could help rugby players, at all levels, but especially at the professional level, to be able to ‘play what is in front of them’ in an effective manner while maintaining the structures and patterns of play drummed into them during the endless training sessions they have to endure.

Her ideas are new to rugby thinking. When I mentioned them to someone involved with training players he expressed, to put it kindly, grave reservations about their validity. Hopefully this is just an initial reaction before thinking through the implications of how these ideas can be usefully applied in training sessions.

Since the departure of Rod Macqueen from the Wallabies, forced out by a clique of player power addicts, Australian rugby has lost an intellectual edge of new ideas that coaches like Alan Jones, Bob Dwyer and Macqueen himself espoused.

Michael Cheika is starting to re-establish this tradition but Australian rugby needs its coaches and trainers, at all levels of the game, to be open to new thinking.

Rugby players, like actors, have a script (the patterns and structures they adopt on defence and attack) that they have to play to in the expectation of achieving a winning outcome. This is where the relevance of Wendy Buswell’s concepts is set.

The actor’s script is more rigid than that of the rugby player. But no performance on the stage runs exactly the same as any previous performance. Performance training comes in to ensure that the actors can cope with the inevitable and many unexpected divergences from the script, from the different reaction of audiences and a host of other factors that ensure that each performance is a different event from all the others before it.

Rugby games are even more likely not to follow the script. Even when a planned move comes off, it is most unlikely that aspect of the move followed the script to the nth degree.

Yet it is not part of the training of rugby players to understand this and, more importantly, have the spatial skills necessary to make the adjustments – as performance trained actors do so effortlessly – when something on the field does not unfold the way it is expected to.

One of Buwell’s exercises is for a player to stand still with his eyes closed. Other players are then told to creep up behind him, as silently as possible. The player with his eyes closed is asked if he is aware of anyone near him. Invariably, this player was not aware that a player had crept up behind him.

The point of the exercise is to develop any awareness, almost like an animal, of where other players, teammates or opponents, might be around them.

One of the players (no names, no pack drill) who was hopeless at this exercise had a reputation for making breaks that almost never resulted in tries because of his lack of awareness of teammates backing him up.

Buswell got her insights into the connection between performance training, which she has taught for years, and rugby when she watched her two sons play the game. She developed ideas and exercises for rugby players because she saw the similarities in the two spheres. Her ideas were briefly tried out with the Wallabies when Robbie Deans was their coach. A fuller version of her program was done with Sydney University’s Under-20 side.

She has written up her experiences in an academic paper, which has the un-academic title (from a remark made by an unimpressed player): That spatial shit! Performance training – an untapped resource in the training of rugby union players.

I won’t go into the detail of this paper. Interested people can Google it and read its 23 detailed pages. But you get a sense of what she is about from this extract:

‘When it comes to space on a rugby field, what do you think of,’ I questioned the players at the beginning of a session. ‘The gap between opposition players,’ calls out one of the players and there is a collective grunt of agreement from others in the room.

‘Is there any other space, other than the gap between the players?’ I continued. The group looks bewildered so I prompted, ‘What about the space above you? Or below you?’ Words are tossed out: ‘wide’, ‘behind’, ‘next-to’. One player adds to the list by remarking, ‘Actually space is everywhere.’ A moment of silence ensued as the others take this in.

‘Is there any advantage of seeing space as more than a ‘a gap,’ or realising that empty space is not a void?’ I ventured, attempting to provoke further discussion. ‘Yeh, gives you more options … could help with decision making, like making a decision not to kick or not’ … means you don’t have to just look for space in front of you.’

When I read this I thought immediately of the All Blacks and what Wayne Smith, now returned to the coaching staff, used to call ‘the third dimension,’ – the air. Clearly the All Blacks with their effective kicking game and their terrific passing game have an understanding that the rugby field is a net of spaces. Exploit the spaces and you win the games.

But first you have to identify where all the spaces are.

From Wendy Buswell’s experiences, this is not something that Australian coaches and, the crucial factor, the top players (aside from noted players with vision like Quade Cooper, a natural) are even prepared to think about let alone do specific training on.

I quote again from her thesis:

Rugby coach Scott Wisemantel notes: ‘I see in all sports, coaches comment “we’ve had a really good training week with limited errors” and then they get belted. This shows that training was nice – means the chaos of the game has not been stressed enough and therefore creating an environment that is too controlled.’

I am aware that time is a limiting factor for rugby coaches and that experimentation is often not an option to be fitted into the timeframe of regular training sessions but as Piltz suggests players need to ‘make sense of the chaotic ebb and flow of action that unfolds during the game.’

They get none of this sense, in my opinion, from the gym obsession that dominates Australian rugby. You see players like Phil Waugh in the past, and James O’Connor now, so muscled up that their flexibility and aerobic capacity, along with their early dazzling speed, is turned into a cement physique.

To my mind, there is something wrong here. Of course, you need the gym work. But it should not become an end in itself with players breaking records for the sake of breaking them. You compare the general bulk-up Australian player, with their rugby brain-power at almost a negative correlation with their bulkiness, and their New Zealand counterparts who tend so sharp of body and mind, like wolves rather than bears.

One of the insights Buswell got from her limited work with the Wallabies (aside from the interest but lack of time Robbie Deans had to try out her ideas) was the sense of entitlement the Wallabies had from everything being done for them. One player, for instance, asked her at an airport when he had lost contact with the team: ‘How do I get to the plane?’

When she told me this, I thought about how Rod Macqueen turned a bunch of losing Wallabies into winners of the 1999 Rugby World Cup and arguably Australia’s greatest side by forcing them to be self-reliant. The first camp Macqueen ran for his Wallabies, he made them cook for themselves, do all their own washing, look after their own laptops and come to practice on bikes.

They had to know where the training field was rather than just be bussed there.

This self-reliance off the field translated to self-reliance on it, as the Wallabies under Macqueen pulled off numerous victories, even against the All Blacks, with last minute surges of points-scoring.

The other aspect about the gym training obsession is that it creates a mind-set that rugby is only a collision game, rather than seeing rugby as a clever game that involves collisions, in other words chess with pieces that can smash into each other.

New Zealand, which is clearly the most successful rugby country in the game’s history, has always understood that the mental game is just as important, if not more so, than the physical game. Books on how best to play rugby came out of New Zealand from as early as 1903. This thinking about the game, what systems work, the best preparations, how to select teams and so on, has continued to this day.

The key to the New Zealand success is the notion that while the fundamentals of rugby remain the same, ways of refining them and enhancing their potency are continual works in progress. New ideas and practices are forever being tried and if they are successful they are used throughout the country. If they don’t work, they are discarded.

I am in the process of completing a long essay on how the All Blacks won the 2011 Rugby World Cup. One of the great stories to come out of this success relates to how Wayne Smith found Ken Quarrie, a Ph.D in statistics, who used the Money Ball philosophy to develop detailed analyses on every aspect of the performances of the All Blacks.

Here are two examples.

First, Quarrie found that Ma’a Nonu rarely won the ball when jumping against an opponent when following up an All Blacks high ball. So Nonu never jumped. He waited for the catch to be made and then smashed the catcher to the ground, with his great strength, turning him as he did so to ensure an All Blacks turnover.

Second, Quarrie found that Conrad Smith is very good at making tackles that created turnovers. This is why he was preferred in the centres ahead of Nonu and Sonny Bill Williams in 2011.

The intriguing aspect of this story is that a journalist, Mark Reason, somehow found out about the Quarrie System. The New Zealand Rugby Union refused Reason permission to interview Quarrie during and before the Rugby World Cup tournament. The project was created in secret and without any doubt gave the All Blacks a significant advantage in analysing what was really happening on the field when the All Blacks were playing.

This brings us to Michael Cheika. Wayne Smith has an interesting article in The Australian in which Cheika revealed “we need to change … if the team is to be the best team the players can be part of…” Part of that change, apparently, is to improve the quality of the training the Wallabies experienced in the McKenzie era.

There was talk that the players compared their Wallabies experience unfavourably with the coaching they received at their Super Rugby franchises. The talk is that Michael Foley will be brought into the Wallabies set up, along with Nathan Grey and apparently Dean Mumm.

You would like to think that someone more creative, someone like Mark Ella or David Campese, could be drafted as well to provide some insights into how the famous Randwick Galloping Greens game – created by the great theoriser Cyril Towers in large part – can once again be brought into the Wallabies system.

And as a final point, one I have made many, many times on The Roar. I just cannot understand why Australia’s modern version of Cyril Towers, Rod Macqueen, has not be brought into the Wallabies camp to play the same sort of role that Wayne Smith plays for the All Blacks.