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Why Bernard Foley has nowhere to hide

12th December, 2017
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Wallabies player Bernard Foley beats England player Mike Brown during the First Test between the Australia Wallabies and the England Roses at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane, Saturday, June 11, 2016. (AAP Image/Dave Hunt)
Expert
12th December, 2017
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It is an axiom of behaviour in the animal kingdom: whatever shows fear and takes flight becomes the hunted. Flight paints a target on your back like nothing else and it is no different in the dog-eat-dog world of elite professional sport.

The Wallabies have a history of trying to protect their playmakers at number ten, which began around 2010. Stephen Larkham had played the position for Australia for the better part of a decade previously, starting life as a fullback before Rod Macqueen turned him into one of the best tens of the professional era.

Ironically, there would have been solid reasons then to play Larkham in the same way that Bernard Foley is deployed by Nathan Grey’s defensive system now. Larkham had the experience at Super Rugby level at fullback already in the bank, and he was the key to Australia’s bewildering playbook of attacking moves from the set-piece, which was far more extensive in the early 2000s.

Diverting him to the backfield would have had the benefit of avoiding the physical wear and tear that occurs in the ten channel defensively and kept his mind and body fresh in a key ‘thinking’ position.

But Macqueen tended to keep Larkham in the channel, and the balance only started to shift when Robbie Deans moved Quade Cooper to fullback during the 2011 World Cup in New Zealand. Cooper was targeted with great success by the All Blacks in a semi-final between what were probably the two best teams in the tournament.

Move onto another Australian coach in the form of Michael Cheika and the same principles are still being employed. Cheika’s number ten of choice, Bernard Foley, is protected in the tram-lines at first phase lineouts and tends to defend in the backfield during phase-play.

But it is that principle of masking or concealment which is creating a target for opposing teams who have had success against both the Wallabies and Foley’s Super Rugby side, the Waratahs. They smell blood when they see the Wallabies attempting to hide their favourite playmaker at number ten, and they go after him wherever he is.

The problem is compounded by the fact Cheika has conspicuously avoided developing alternatives in both half-back positions, where they have been enthusiastically developed elsewhere in the team throughout 2017. Reece Hodge played at ten against Japan, but that is about it.

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The sudden abandonment of Quade Cooper by both his province and his country has sharpened that and really brought it into focus. If Foley is unavailable, who replaces him and how do the Wallabies reorganise in the backline?

It is no coincidence that England under Eddie Jones are 5-0 against Michael Cheika’s Wallabies and that the bedrock of their game-plan is the ‘hunting’ of Bernard Foley in both attack and defence. It is an awful lot of pressure for one player to handle consistently.

bernard foley makes break

(AAP Image/Dave Hunt)

The wet weather conditions at Twickenham in November marked the target on Foley’s back in the brightest of reds.

It also coincided with another of England’s aims in that match, which was to create a succession of wins in the kicking game, whether they were receiving the kick and returning it, or kicking it themselves.

The game started with a kicking duel between Foley and England left winger Elliott Daly which resolved in favour of the men in white.

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Australia spent a couple of phases setting up a kicking position for Foley before he delivered a diagonal which landed in Daly’s lap well outside the England 22. Daly had all the time he needed to pin Foley back in his own 22 with the left-footed return. Foley was forced to kick the ball out at halfway from a narrow angle, with an England attacking lineout to follow.

England’s ability to read Foley’s kicking game and get into the right position to receive it was a first-half theme:

They also began to identify the opportunities presented to return Foley’s higher, contestable kicks better as the match wore on. The best chance occurred at the beginning of the second half:

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The hangtime on Foley’s kick is not too bad at all, coming in a fraction short of the NFL-approved average for punters of 4.44 seconds in the air. However, it is still short of the class leaders in American football, such as Marquette King of the Oakland Raiders, who can keep the ball up in the skies for over a second longer!

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Fatally, the one-man chase from Reece Hodge is not sufficient to prevent Daly making an offload to Anthony Watson and setting up the counter-attack.

The counter is developed after Watson is tackled in midfield on the following phase, with Maro Itoje part of a three-man overlap out to the English right:

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Courtney Lawes passes the ball out of the first line of attack and George Ford straightens his run intelligently to condense the Wallaby outside defenders towards the ball. At the key moment, Itoje makes the wrong decision and fails to pass immediately to Jonathan Joseph and Jonny May in acres of space outside him – otherwise, a try would have been the likely result.

When Foley dropped back from the tram-lines into the backfield from lineouts, England followed him with their own kicking game:

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May (who is probably England’s best chaser of a ball in the air) got first touch over Foley on this occasion, but the ball went forward. If May had been able to win the ball more cleanly, there was a promising attacking scenario for England with two other players in white in close support:

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The pressure on Foley was cumulative, as England chased their prey around the field. On the next occasion Foley fielded a high kick, he chose to hand on that pressure to Will Genia and Kurtley Beale inside him:

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The pressure began to make itself felt on the areas which Foley’s positioning was supposed to protect. He shanked his first kick at goal badly in the 23rd minute, and an attacking opportunity was lost due to a forward pass:

There are still times when Foley has to stand in the front line in defence, and one of those times is at the scrum. England again targeted him when there was nowhere to hide, with Chris Robshaw running straight over the top of Foley to create another scoring opportunity:

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Robshaw breaks the line from a standing start before offloading to Joe Launchbury, who delivers another good pass to release the England backs.

Summary
Although Stephen Larkham converted from fullback to number ten with major impact on the international scene, for the most part he defended in the front line when Rod Macqueen was in charge of the Wallabies.

Quade Cooper was probably the first Test number ten to defend regularly at fullback in the Robbie Deans era, but the experiment could not be called a success at the 2011 World Cup. It gave the All Blacks an obvious target in the key semi-final match between Australia and New Zealand, one which they exploited to the hilt.

In Nathan Grey’s defensive system, Bernard Foley only defends in the front line from scrums, at lineout he is in the tram-lines to start, then drops into backfield duty as a second fullback thereafter.

Wallaby Bernard Foley kicks for touch

(Image: Tim Anger)

Partly because they know Australia currently lack a credible Test match alternative to Foley with the abandonment of Quade Cooper, Australia’s smartest opponents tend to target Foley and give him as much to do as possible – to overload and undermine him at the same time, if you like.

They either engage him in kicking duels they are likely to win, or force him to kick anticipating a promising return. They target him with their own kicking game when he drops to fullback. If he stays in the line, they look to attack him directly on the carry.

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There truly is nowhere for Foley to hide at present, especially considering Michael Cheika has chosen not to develop his options in the halves so Foley can be given a rest against top-class opposition.

This applies also to scrum-half, where Cheika has options both home (Joe Powell and Jake Gordon) and abroad (Nic White, who has successfully moved his game on again at Exeter), but has yet to find a convincing back-up for Will Genia.

Come the new season in 2018, the halves in Australian rugby will under the microscope like never before, as the Wallabies look to create a healthy competition in those positions where currently, none exists.

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