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The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz coined the phrase ‘fog of war’ to explain the confusion of thought and action that takes over during a hard-fought battle.
I had some sense of this at the end of the first round of Super Rugby 2015.
So what caused the run of upset results?
Initially, they seemed inexplicable. But after thinking about the games and the outcomes, especially the surprising collapse of the Crusaders and the Waratahs, the fog may be lifting a little to expose, perhaps, some reasons for what happened.
One of the Roarers who was at the Waratahs-Western Force match made what I believe was an intriguing comment when he said that Michael Cheika allowed his side to spend too much time in the hot sun on Sunday afternoon during their pre-match drill session.
The Waratahs come out flat for the actual match, as if they were exhausted already, and played with none of the verve, speed and flair of last season.
When I read this I immediately thought about the semi-final between the Wallabies and the All Blacks in the 2003 Rugby World Cup at Sydney. It was an incredibly warm night. The back of John Mitchell, the All Blacks coach, was covered with flies as he supervised a relentless pre-match drill session.
A month or so earlier at Sydney the All Blacks had monstered the Wallabies. In the semi-final, after the fateful Stirling Mortlock intercept when an early All Blacks try was on, they hardly fired a shot.
Did Cheika do a Mitchell to the Waratahs? It will be interesting to see if he scales back the pre-match drills for Friday night’s match against the Rebels.
I’d also like to know how hard he trained the Waratahs during the week before the first match. Michael Foley, for instance, has explained that last year he overdid the intensity of the preparation before the match against the Waratahs and his side was blown away, just as the Force blew away the Waratahs last weekend.
Another intriguing point was raised in The New Zealand Herald by Daniel Richardson in an article titled: Super Rugby: String of away victories gives tipsters yet more to chew on.
“It must be an anomaly but the four most efficient teams on defence all lost during the weekend,” Richardson wrote.
Richardson notes that the Waratahs made 92 per cent of their tackles, the Reds and Crusaders both 91 per cent and the Lions 90 per cent.
The point here is that these teams needed to make all these tackles because they were all beaten at the break-down. In rugby, it is far more important to contest and win the breakdowns and win the battle of the advantage line than it is to make all your tackles.
The Force overwhelmed the Waratahs at the breakdown. They sent several players in to most of the rucks and mauls and slowed down the Waratahs ball, or forced turnovers.
Tatafu Polota-Nau made the point to The Sydney Morning Herald that “the Force were just very accurate in their tackling, and also pilfering. If there is one area we need to improve on it is probably our breakdown”.
Right on! Let’s see if the words are backed up by action.
I notice in naming his team for the match against the Rebels, Cheika named Michael Hooper as right flanker and Jacques Potgieter as left flanker. What happened to the open and blind side nomenclature?
Randwick used to play the right and left flanker system in Cheika’s days as a tough, uncompromising number 8. It was the Australian system then. In the decades since then Australian teams, including the Wallabies, have adopted the New Zealand system of openside flanker being a digger and the blindside flanker playing in a zone.
The effect of the Australian system was that there was no designated digger, rather like South African rugby. Every player is expected to dig for the ball at breakdowns. But teams like the Brumbies with David Pocock, who have a designated digger to lead the way for the others (and Richie McCaw for the All Blacks), tend to do better in forcing turnovers and slowing down their opponent’s ball than teams that do with out a designated digger.
The Rebels did terrible damage to the Crusaders at the breakdown. They were helped by Todd Blackadder’s stupid and disrespectful mistake of using McCaw as a number six tackler and protector of the blindside zone rather than as a digger.
Incidentally, there was far more venom and physicality (occasionally too much) in the work of the Rebels at the ruck. They played like Rebels with a cause. The Crusaders brought all the meekness of lambs to the slaughter to their play.
There was a photo of McCaw and Scott Higginbotham having a laugh about things after the match. It is astonishing how much foul play that is delivered to the head and body of McCaw (and the eyes as in the 2011 Rugby World Cup final) and how he never reacts violently against the perpetrator.
Would Higginbotham have been so understanding if McCaw had whacked him, unintentionally on purpose, as he did to the All Blacks captain? I doubt it. But then again, Higginbotham’s intensity reflected the intensity of his side that created the opportunity for the Rebels to pull off their first ever victory out of Australia.
The Brumbies and the Hurricanes both unleashed the two terrific diggers in Pocock and Ardie Savea.
Pocock played like an old master, rather like George Smith when he came back to Australia in 2013 to play against the British and Irish Lions. In this form, you would have to put him straight into the Wallabies in the number seven jersey.
But now that he is out of action for some weeks with an ankle injury, it will be fascinating to see how the Brumbies will adjust in his absence. The Chiefs, who the Brumbies play at New Plymouth on Friday night, have the best digger in New Zealand in Sam Cane. Cane totally out-played Luke Braid, the Blues number seven, in the Blues-Chiefs match.
I am expecting him to do the same against the Brumbies, in the absence of Pocock making a nuisance of himself on the Chiefs’ ball.
Savea has been talked about as a wonder kid of New Zealand rugby for a couple of years. The Hurricanes have brought him along gently, allowing him to bulk up a bit before unleashing him this year. He was quite dynamic against the Lions and his aggression and speed at the breakdown could turn the Hurricanes from entertainers into winners.
The Hurricanes also have a new coaching staff for Super Rugby 2015, with head coach Chris Boyd and his assistant John Plumtree. I noticed that the Hurricanes were effective in thwarting the driving mauls of the Lions. Plumtree was coach at the Sharks between 2008 and 2012.
He would have learnt a lot about the driving maul techniques of South African sides, how to mount them and how to thwart them from his time there. Will this sort of inside information about South African rugby work against the Bulls the way it did against the Lions?
This is the problem of trying to work your way through the fog of war in the early days of a conflict, the sort of situation we are in now with only the first round of Super Rugby 2015 played.
The question of refereeing performance is yet to be processed. I thought, for instance, that the refereeing overall was good. The games flowed and were allowed to flow, except for the Waratahs-Force match where Steve Walsh, generally a top referee, did not have one of his better days.
My understanding is that if a kick-off goes over the try line and is forced, then play re-starts with a scrum on halfway. Kurtley Beale forced a Force kick-off and ran back to halfway only to be told by Walsh that the re-start was a 22 drop out.
Walsh also allowed the Force too much indulgence in slowing down the game to a such dawdling, slow-motion pace that Waratahs supporters were leaving in their droves before the final whistle. Even though I was watching the match live, I felt impelled from time to time to try to fast-forward the action out of frustration at the time-wasting.
Walsh is the referee for the Chiefs-Brumbies match. It adds to the ‘fog of war’ confusion when you have to try to factor in how a referee will officiate, especially in how he deals with or refuses to deal with tactics that are clearly against the spirit of the game and, in some cases, the laws of the game.
Rugby, like chess, is a war game. Unlike chess there is a physically confrontational aspect to how it is played, rather like chess with pieces that smash into each other and can do grievous bodily harm on occasions.
The fog lifts to allow us to see the next battle, which will happen over the weekend. But understanding what the outcomes of these new battles mean for the way teams prosper or perish in Super Rugby 2015, there’s the challenge!