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The Waratahs Berrick Barnes kicks the ball against the Sharks during their Super 14 rugby match in Sydney on Saturday, March 7, 2010. The Waratahs defeated the Sharks 25-21. AAP Image/Paul Miller.
The excellent rugby writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, Rupert Guinness, has written an intriguing article arguing that the “the Waratahs have defied the perception they are a team reliant on kicking.”
The article quotes statistics compiled by Fair Play Sports Analysis Systems to show that last year the Waratahs recorded 33 kicks per game during the season, and that this year, it averages only 22 kicks a match.
For the record, the order of kicking sides in the 2010 Super 14 tournament, according to the statistics is: Sharks (32 kicks a game): Stormers (30): Brumbies (28): Cheetahs (27): Bulls (27): Highlanders and Lions (26): Reds (24): Chiefs (24): Force, Crusaders and Hurricanes (23): Waratahs (22): Lions (18).
The statistics place the Waratahs as the second-least kicking side in the tournament.
Guiness states that this statistic should be taken as “fact.” And Chris Hickey, the beleagured coach of the Waratahs, is quoted as saying: “The statistics show that despite the perception of some people we don’t kick the ball a lot.”
I would include myself as among the “some people” category. Do the statistics prove me and the other critics wrong?
It won’t surprise many people that I maintain that we (the “some people” group) are right to assert that the Waratahs tend to kick too much ball away to their opponents.
The first point I would make is that the statistics are averages.
In the case of the Waratahs, the non-kicking statistics are inflated because of the match against the Lions when the the Waratahs hardly kicked the ball at all. They were too busy running in 11 tries.
If the Waratahs had played their usual game of kicking the ball away, their average kicking statistics would be much higher.
There is something else wrong with the methodology used to establish these so-called facts.
The statistics tell us how many times the sides kicked on average in a match. They do not tell us what the percentage of kicks to possession is. And this is the crucial information.
Take the Chiefs, for example.
They kick far too much and, in particular, overplay the chip kick (especially the grossly over-rated Stephen Donald). Yet the Chiefs are recorded as averaging only 24 kicks in a game, well down the kicking list.
In their last two matches, according to their coach, Ian Foster, the Chiefs won only 35 per cent of possession. This means that although the average kicking count is lower than 8 other teams on the list, the Chiefs are ACTUALLY kicking away a very high percentage of their possessions.
The same argument applies to the Highlanders who have deprived their very good backline of ball to run with by incessant kicking by their halfback, Jimmy Cowan. This tactic is the single most important reason why the Highlanders are losing matches they should be winning.
You can’t score tries when the opposition is given the ball all the time.
I don’t have the possession statistics of the Waratahs. But my guess is that the Waratahs are a side that kicks away a high percentage of its possessions.
The essential point in all of this is that rugby teams must kick the ball. The game started as RUGBY FOOTBALL after all. But it is what you do with your kicking that is the crucial thing.
The Bulls, for instance, are a kicking side. But they are a good kicking side.
They generally don’t do chip kicks. The box kicks and high balls are invariably chased and contested. When kicking for territory is done, the kick is invariably long and directed towards touch.
The Waratahs kicking is none of these things.
They are a bad kicking side. The box kicks are rarely chased. The high ball never chased. There are too many chips that are not re-gathered, and have no chance of being re-gathered.
This is dreadful, brain-dead rugby.
Instead of a strong Waratahs side, which is loaded with Wallabies, sweeping aside most oppositions, opponents are kept in the game because of the fetish of kicking the ball away without any systems for getting the ball back.
Of course, it is not only the Waratahs among the Australian teams that are guilty of this kicking nonsense. The Western Force and the ACT Brumbies kick far too much, or put better, kick badly far too much.
Against the Blues last weekend, for example, the Brumbies were leading just after half-time when Josh Valentine, with no great pressure on him around his 22, kicked a high ball.
The Blues snaffled the ball, ran it wide and scored a try. This try gave them the momentum to score two more tries, including one from the ensuing kick-off when Rene Ranger made his startling break.
Valentine’s stupid kick started the scoring spree.
Someone once declared that statistics are like bikinis: “What they reveal is interesting but what they conceal is crucial.”
The kicking statistics quoted by the SMH, therefore, should be treated with some discretion before they are canonised as “facts.”