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How to beat the All Blacks: A lesson from Roger Federer

Roger Federer made the right call to miss the French Open. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin, File)
Roar Guru
25th March, 2017
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3233 Reads

The best book on tennis strategy ever written is called Winning Ugly by Brad Gilbert.

It is advertised as being “mental warfare in tennis”, but at the end of the day what it really amounts to is two things.

1. Staying positive mentally and always believing you can win; and,
2. Finding your opponent’s relative weakness and exploiting it, while maximising your relative strength

By doing this you can beat players who are better than you. It even works, sometimes, against players who are better than you in every single way.

If you play your normal game then odds are, even if you play well, you will lose.

However, if you play in such a way as to maximise your relative strengths and to exploit their relative weaknesses then you have a much better chance of winning, especially if your opponent is having an off day.

Indeed, by maximising your strengths and their weaknesses you can make the opponent have an off day. If a player making errors from their weakest shot then they can get frustrated and lose the match mentally. When the match is lost mentally, it is almost always lost in reality as well. The same is true in rugby, possibly the only sport I have played that matches, or even overtakes tennis in terms of the importance of strategy and game-plan.

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The Wallabies’ relative weaknesses are exits from the 22, forwards who cannot front up physically and a propensity for committing penalties.

Generally speaking, the most effective way to beat the Wallabies is by playing pure 10-man rugby, or a hybrid, pinning the Wallabies in their own 22 and then watching the team panic and kicking penalty goes, or scoring tries through set-piece dominance. England did it to great effect in 2016, as did Ireland.

Even the horrific 2016 Springboks scored a win against the Wallabies by going back-to-basics and playing traditional Springboks 10-man rugby.

Argentina, France, Scotland and Wales, all of whom tried to play a more expansive strategy relying less on forward dominance lost to the Wallabies.

The Springboks’ relative weakness are a lack of risk-taking, an inability often fail to rack up an unassailable lead even when dominating the match physically, and an over-propensity to kick away possession.

As such, the way to beat the Springboks isn’t by playing 10-man rugby (for they are usually better than every other team at playing such rugby).

Because their forwards are so powerful and physical, and their set piece usually so good, the way to beat them is through passing the ball through the backs and getting the ball around their often-slow forwards. Until 2016 the Springboks had one of the best defences I have ever seen; especially at defending against the All Blacks.

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Thus, an extremely high proportion of tries against the All Blacks are off broken play. If you go back to 2010 and watch the Wallabies’ two wonderful performances against the Springboks at altitude, most of the tries scored was through counterattacking off of poor kicks or dropped balls.

How do you beat the All Blacks? The answer is, not easily.

However, the All Blacks do have some relative weaknesses, and these are:

1. Often pushing the lines of what is legal, thereby committing a lot of penalties, especially when they are frustrated during close matches;
2. They tend to panic when their forwards are overpowered, and commit even more penalties as a result.

The best example of this can be seen in 2009 when Morne Steyn the Springboks beat the All Blacks 31-19 in Durban, in which the two Steyns’ boots kept the All Blacks pinned in their 22, while Morne the goal-kicking robot wracked up 31 points. The Springboks actually succeeded in a 3-0 clean-sweep that year.

Ireland’s victory over the All Blacks in 2016 was another example of a match primarily won by forwards and set-piece dominance plus strong kicking out of hand and for points. Even though Ireland scored a lot of tries that match most were off the back of set piece dominance.

To win a match by, primarily, scoring 3 points rather than 5 or 7 you need to have a fantastic defence, great goal-kickers, a good set-piece and, ideally, some powerful outside backs to keep the All Blacks on their toes. To this end, I suggest the following Lions 23.

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1. Jack McGrath
2. Rory Best
3. Tadhg Furlong
4. Maro Itoje
5. Joe Launchbury
6. Peter O’Mahony
7. Sam Warburton
8. Billy Vunipola
9. Conor Murray
10. Jonathan Sexton
11. Liam Williams
12. Owen Farrell
13. Jonathan Joseph
14. George north
15. Stuart Hogg
16. Joe Marler
17. Ken Owens
18. Dan Cole
19. Alun Wyn Jones
20. Sean O’Brien
21. Rhys Webb
22. Robbie Henshaw
23. Elliot Daly

For all this talk about teams having to emulate the All Blacks. Well, this is true, all teams should learn from the successes of better teams. However, they should play to their traditional strengths rather than abandoning them in face of emulating the strategy of New Zealand.

Roger Federer did not reinvent himself as a serve and volleyer in his latter career, despite the calls to do so, now that he can no longer match Djokovic, Nadal and Wawrinka and Murray by slogging from behind the baseline.

Instead, he focused on his relative strengths – serving, volleying and the ability to take the ball early in order to win by playing more aggressively. He has been standing closer to (or inside) the baseline, taking the ball early and coming into the net only when the opportunity presents itself.

The Lions must play to their strengths – set-piece, forwards and goal-kicking – if they want to beat the All Blacks.

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