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Dean Cox of the West Coast Eagles and Richmond's Tyrone Vickery contest the ruck during the AFL Round 12 match between the Richmond Tigers and the West Coast Eagles at the MCG, Melbourne. Slattery Images
Rule changes within the game have made leg speed critical to winning games. Unfortunately, leg speed and ruckmen are not compatible. Due to their lanky frames and commanding body weights, there is no question that traditional ruckmen are the slowest players on the field.
What has made Aaron Sandilands and Dean Cox classier ruckmen than their cohort has been their ability to gather possessions as an extra midfielder through hard running across the ground.
On top of this, they consistently take contested marks, lay tackles and gather clearances. These are the requirements of a primary ruckman in today’s game.
With the substitution rule developing, almost every team is playing one traditional ruckman with a backup whose natural position is to hold a key position post. The backup will not possess the height of a ruckman but their job description requires them only to provide a contest.
Hit outs are irrelevant to backup ruckman.
If a backup ruckman can simply disrupt his opposition’s tap, the classier midfielders will read the ball and swoop accordingly thus gaining the clearance for their team.
On Saturday, Tom Hawkins and Cameron Mooney rucked the entire second half against Todd Goldstein. The Cats pair combined for 10 hit outs compared to Goldstein’s 29. The Geelong midfield won the clearance count 32–28.
At Etihad Stadium, Angus Graham and Ty Vickery combined for 16 hit outs against Sandilands 43. Fremantle won the clearances 42-35 but only eight clearances from an additional 27 hit outs should infuriate Mark Harvey.
In the Q-Clash, Zac Clark and Tom Lynch combined for 21 hit outs against Matthew Luenberger’s 52. The Sun’s dominated the clearances 60-30. The damning statistic here is Clarke had six clearances to Luenberger’s one.
In all three games, the team with fewer hit outs has won the game which leads me to argue that any quality midfield can make a ruckman irrelevant to a game.
Various coaches have utilised the substitution rule by taking off their primary ruckman and injecting a faster set of legs into the game, thus relying on backup ruckman to finish the game.
Friday night saw Brent Renouf substituted off for the second game in a row. Saturday saw Ben Hudson, Mike Pyke and Brad Ottens all substituted off for quicker midfielders capable of breaking the lines at the expense of fatiguing oppositions. In each case over this weekend, the withdrawal of a big man for speed has led to victory (someone had to win the Sydney/Bulldogs game).
It was widely publicised that the substitution rule would bring an end to playing two traditional ruckman which has led players like Mark Blake and Cameron Wood to only get chances upon injury to starters.
In 2005, Geelong made it to the Preliminary Final with Cameron Mooney (195cm) rucking the majority of the year with Peter Street (211cm) as his occasional backup. It didn’t bother the classy Geelong midfield that Mooney was consistently tripled or quadrupled in the hit out count.
Players like Wood and Blake have dedicated their entire lives to mastering their tap work and suddenly players are thrust into their positions with almost no technical knowledge, yet are performing admirably by ‘providing a contest’.
This should be seen as an insult to the art of rucking.
Alas it is not because ruckman are becoming irrelevant so long as there are a group of midfielders capable of reading the ball.
Now that the substitution rule has limited the careers of backup traditional ruckman, how much longer will it be until a team relies solely on rucking with multiple backups? To play three or four key position players as occasional ruckman seems very possible in the future.
Tap work is rapidly deteriorating in our game and if a ruckman cannot hold a key position or consistently gather 15-plus touches, we may see the end of the ‘designated ruckman’.
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