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Jannie du Plessis ran 24 metres this season, and beat one defender. Who is that defender?
Can someone please tell me who it was? Did Jannie shake and bake him? Shimmy and step him? Or just blow by him with a hip swivel?
Jannie passed a few times, too, but not as many times as Adam Ashley-Cooper. Aussie Roarers love to say that Ashley-Cooper has more surnames than offloads, but let’s be fair.
The Great Hyphenated One did pass 31 times this season. That was 84 times fewer than Schalk Burger (who was the second-most prolific passing forward, behind 129-pass Liam Messam).
Actually, Wyatt Crockett passed exactly the same number of times as Adam Ashley-Cooper.
I’ll let that sink in. It’s a soaring, boring statistic, but let it sink in.
Comparing a prop’s passes to a utility back’s passes is unfair. That’s true.
A flyhalf is supposed to manufacture points. Demetri Catrakilis scores points. He scores 0.18 points a minute. Bernard Foley only scores 0.13 points a minute.
When you extrapolate that differential over an 80-minute game, it’s 4 points. I don’t know if you find that significant, but it’s a cool way to look at things.
Foley could erase that differential if he would stop missing so many kicks at goal. He took 88 shots at the posts this season and made just less than 70 per cent. Lima Sopoaga, who is thought of as an unreliable kicker, made 70 per cent of his 89 attempts.
That’s something to think about as we go into World Cup mode.
Speaking of kicks, Aaron Smith is a kicking scrumhalf. He kicked more times in general play (118) than Catrakilis. He even kicked more times than Will Genia.
To continue the themes of surprise, scrumhalves and Foley, I should point out that Foley passed more than any non-scrumhalf in Super Rugby this year (354 times).
But I regret to inform you that Foley made more handling errors than any other player, too (32 errors). He beat out Nick Phipps (29) for that honour. Their teammate Israel Folau made 28 handling errors. If the Wallabies want to avoid Northern Hemisphere scrums, they will need to tighten up on this.
When players lose the ball, it’s loose, and there is an odd stat called “loose ball collected.” It’s not a sexy stat, but it does generally allow us to see active players who go looking for work and dangerous situations.
Also, it’s not a stat that is dominated by one backline position (as in tackling for loose forwards, passes for scrumhalves, metres run by fullbacks, kicks by flyhalves and penalties conceded for props). Loose ball is collected by fullbacks (Cheslin Kolbe, Ben Smith, Jesse Kriel, Lolagi Visinia), scrumhalves (Phipps, Genia, White), wings (Dillyn Leyds, Lachlan Turner), and utility backs (Kurtley Beale and Andries Coetzee). It is not a statistic in which forwards feature.
But some forwards are non-traditional. Michael Hooper had five try assists, far and away the most by a non-backline player. Ardie Savea was 12th in the list of players with clean breaks, the most for any forward. Messam and Burger featured in number of passes.
Of course, a lot of these stats are unreliable because I haven’t reduced them – as I did with points-per-minute – to a time factor. Potential Wallabies dominate the sheer number of minutes played this season.
Is Michael Cheika worried? Christian Lealifano (1353 minutes), Joe Tomane (1336), Henry Speight (1323), Scott Fardy (1310), Folau (1280), Foley (1280), and Hooper (1268) are all in the top ten minutes played. And Beale, Phipps, and Higginbotham are in the top twenty. The most-played South African and New Zealand players aren’t really national stalwarts.
Tackles tire you out. Warren Whiteley take a bow. He made 227 of 233 tackle attempts to lap the field. The highest tackle count for a non-loose forward?
Francois Venter of the Cheetahs (169). But I think that’s actually a bad sign for a team, when a centre is having to make that many tackles.
Victor Matfield is often maligned on this site as just a lineout jumper. But he made 100 of 107 tackles. Another lock, Eben Etzebeth, had an astonishing 98.8 per cent tackle success rate. Contrast that with Hooper’s 87.2 per cent rate (but of course, Hooper gets to places to attempt tackles that no forward has any business being in, like in the open field grasping at Cheslin Kolbe).
Matfield is ‘just’ a lineout guy, but lineout steals are potent weapons. The whole field is thrown into chaos when a defending team loses its own lineout in their 22.
Marco Wentzel stole 14 lineout throws. Pierre Spies, Adam Thomson and Etzebeth all stole 9. Etzebeth had to steal lineout throws to get any – his hookers were the worst throwers in all of rugby. All four of these guys are highly athletic forwards, with big vertical leaps, long arms and big mitts.
Athletic forwards are the wave of the future. Jaco Kriel is a great example. He ran 625 metres with the ball – the most of any forward. And it wasn’t just pick and goes from the base for a metre. His average was 4.34 metres per carry, he beat 44 defenders on 144 carries, made 9 clean breaks, offloaded 10 times and scored 4 tries.
He also competed at the breakdown. Liam Gill was the best at winning turnovers (29). He was only pinged 14 times.
The leaders (with turnovers won/penalties conceded ratio shown):
Gill 29/14
Pocock 24/7
Kriel 22/8
Cane 18/17
McCaw 18/18
As you can see, Pocock is world class, but is Kriel really that far behind?
The top back at winning turnovers? The super physical Henry Speight! Also, are fellow strongmen Francois Hougaard and Malakai Fekitoa.
Backs do carry the ball more. In the top twenty ball carriers, only five forwards feature.
Offloads are still an Anzac skill. In the top twenty offloaders, there are 12 Kiwis, 6 Aussies, and 2 South Africans. Will Skelton is the most prolific non-back offloader. Burger is the only South African forward who offloads at a Kiwi pace.
Messam and Fardy are the most-penalised players (22 penalties each), but then the top twenty is dominated by props, who have to play the scrum lottery. The most penalised back is Aaron Smith (11). And he’s generally seen as the least replaceable player on the best team in the world, so go figure!
Join The Roar rugby editor Christy Doran, former Wallaby Matt Toomua and a cast of regular and special guests as they look at the biggest issues in the game on The Roar Rugby Podcast. If you’re looking for great odds on the next game check out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Chances are you’re about to lose. Set a deposit limit.