- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
The irony in the Brumbies’ tough (in mind and body) 16-9 victory over the Sharks is that they used the Jake White tactics taught to them by the master himself to defeat White’s current Super Rugby team, the Sharks. This was a hoist on his own petard defeat for White.
The Sharks played the classic White territory game with the added negativity of continually driving from lineouts rather than daring to use their backs. The result was that once again the Sharks failed to score a try in the first half, not the first time this has happened in recent games.
The point here is that if you don’t try to score tries and instead trust that the opposition will gift you tries from their mistakes under pressure, you won’t actually score many tries.
The Sharks are still leading the 2014 Super Rugby table with 36 points from 11 matches. But they are among the bottom teams on the table in terms of tries scored. The Lions have scored only 16. The Sharks, the Bulls and the Rebels have scored 18. Even the bottom team. the Stormers, have scored 21 tries.
At some stage in the tournament, probably in the finals, the Sharks are going to have to try to score tries or lose crucial matches. When you try to score tries, though, the attack is often detrimental to an iron-clad defence. By not trying to score tries, the Sharks don’t give oppositions much chance of exploiting their (the Sharks) mistakes.
This is the reason why the Sharks have such a splendid defensive record, the best in the tournament. They have only conceded 15 tries. The Force and the Waratahs are the next best, with 18 tries conceded. The Waratahs have scored 26 tries and the Force 23 tries.
The Sharks have far and away the best points differential with +87, despite the fact that they have only scored three tries more than they have conceded. This gives an indication of the reliance the Sharks place on kicking penalties. The Crusaders, with their massive 57-29 thrashing of the Reds, the first time they have achieved over 50 points in Australia, have the second best points differential +74.
The Waratahs on +53 and the Chiefs at +52 (scoring 35 tries and conceding 22) are the next best teams.
The Brumbies have scored 30 tries, at a rate of just under three a match. It is fitting, therefore, that a try scored by Sam Carter, after a deft pop-up pass from the feisty halfback Nic White, was the deciding event in a match that was a kickathon contest between two teams playing Jake White tactics of non-running rugby. At one point in the first half, the match commentator Greg Clark noted that both sides had kicked the ball over 40 times each.
When you have a gifted broken field runner like Jesse Mogg meticulously kicking back every ball he received in the Brumbies’ half, you know you have a travesty of what rugby should be all about. The White dogma of no running in your own half, which both sides followed to the letter of the law, is bringing back a football element in a game that really no longer exists, the old rugby football code.
The modern game in the professional era dictates the contest must also be entertainment. Rugby is now a ball-in-hand game, played essentially standing up, with a constant contest with possession, and with kicking for points and in general play only one of the skills of the game along with all the other skills of passing, running, catching, scrumming, jumping and tackling.
Even when the Sharks desperately needed to score a try, they still continued to kick the ball away in the bizarre belief that if the Brumbies had the ball then somehow the Sharks were going to score a try.
Readers of The Roar will know I hate this type of rugby. The Waratahs played the same sort of game and even when they were losing dared to called it ‘winning ugly.’ It was in reality ‘losing ugly’ rugby. I deplored it then and deplore it now with the Sharks. The Brumbies play it to a lesser extent, because they are at least giving runners like Pat McCabe a chance to do their stuff.
The Sharks are winning more games than they have lost this season, with eight wins and three losses. But their last three matches now have resulted in two losses. They have an 86 per cent record of wins at home this season. The fervent hope of all those who love the rugby game, the modern game of fast, entertaining, skilful play, is that the Sharks will not win the 2014 Super Rugby title playing the White game of non-rugby.
Jake White brought this same game to the Brumbies last year. And this year Stephen Larkham hasn’t had the time to refine the White gameplan to take into account the abilities and flair of Australian players to run with the ball and make breaks. But even under White, and now under Larkham, the ability of the best Australian players to set up and score tries has survived.
Once Larkham has more time with his squad, which seems to want to stay together, you would expect the team to begin to play more like the sides that Rod Macqueen created and Eddie Jones coached; sides with strong set pieces, killer back line moves when needed, robust defences and a willingness to put pressure on oppositions by attacking with the ball in hand rather than continually putting the ball in the air.
And why do I hate the Jake White game which Planet Rugby calls kick-tennis.
First, it takes all the glory and boldness out of rugby. Second, it relies on mistakes of the opposition and your own sharp-shooting goal-kicking to secure victories. Third, and probably most importantly, teams playing this game don’t get easy points: it is like playing from the baseline in tennis rather than having an all-court game that involves sometimes going to the net. Fourth, following up on this last point, you have to dominate up-front, especially in the set pieces (in the way Victor Matfield mastered the lineout in the Rugby World Cup 2007), to eke out victories.
In other words, despite its seeming expediency and practicality, it is actually an impractical way of trying to win rugby matches. For it depends a great deal on how the opposition responds to the predictable game plan they have to try and counter.
And we got a good sense of all these points in the opening exchanges at Canberra’s GIO Stadium on Saturday night. The Brumbies came out trying to fight the aggression of the Sharks with their own aggression. But like so many Australian sides they confused aggression with foul play.
Stephen Moore became a one-man penalty count giving away a series of penalties early on as the two sides bashed into each other trying to establish some sort of physical mastery.
And here is the important point. The Sharks missed a series of relatively easy kicks at goal. When you don’t score tries, you have to convert virtually every penalty shot at goal to be successful. Think Percy Montgomery in Rugby World Cup 2007 banging the kicks over from everywhere throughout.
Frans Steyn was no Percy Montgomery and the Sharks lost the match. Great, and let’s hope there are more losses to come if they continue to inflict kick-tennis on Super Rugby followers.
The Lions showed against the Highlanders, in a match in which they almost snatched victory at the death, that teams can play with the special style of South African physicality and use plenty of driving mauls, but they can also run with the ball and score ensemble tries from pressure exerted. There doesn’t have to be continual kicking, and tries can result from continuity in the phases.
For me, the result of the round, aside from the astonishing second half played by the Crusaders that smashed down the Reds’ fortress at Suncorp Stadium, was the terrific win by the Western Force 23-16 over the Cheetahs at Bloemfontein.
A win by a touring side to South Africa, no matter which team is the local side, is a fine achievement. The Western Force won the match with composure and smart, heads-up play and with one terrific ensemble try.
What I like about the Western Force is that the team looked to be well-coached (yes, I know, I have bagged Michael Foley a lot in the past, but what can you say) and disciplined, in that they played what was in front of them rather than what they thought might be in front of them.
I say this without any further comment: Chris Pollock, the New Zealand referee, gave a polished, good-humoured, under-stated and accurate performance.
The Western Force won a penalty, which they kicked, in the first minute of the game. Towards the end of the match, when a Western Force player body-slammed an attacking Cheetahs runner to the ground, Pollock immediately called out: ‘I’m happy with that.’
Craig Joubert, refereeing in South Africa, does this, as well. The immediate call by the referee takes the assistant referees out of the picture, which often is an extremely good thing.
The Western Force has a strong scrum which monstered the Cheetahs a few times. The lineout is good. And the loose forwards are a wonderful trio, none of them probably starting Wallabies but well worth a look at by the Australian selectors for their squad. The point here is that they concede very few penalties and get more turnovers than most of the other teams in the tournament.
The Western Force are fourth on the table with 31 points, three points behind the Brumbies, the leading Australian side. But the Force have a game in hand having played 10 matches to the 11 of the Brumbies.
Who would have thought that after Round 13 of the 2014 Super Rugby tournament that with two Australian sides in the top six, the Brumbies and the Western Force, and the Waratahs in seventh place, one point out of the six, that the Reds would be struggling near the bottom of the table, with the Rebels?
I reported some weeks ago that I’d heard that Quade Cooper was unhappy with things in the Reds camp. He certainly played like a man who really didn’t care a great deal about fighting for the team’s cause. Some of his kicking incensed even Greg Martin, the Fox Sports colour man who only sees matters on the field tinted in red, it seems to me.
The distracted Cooper is an entirely different players from the gutsy, energetic and electrifying player who virtually won the 2011 Super Rugby title by himself.
And is just coincidental that the Western Force have become a force since Richard Graham left them and the Reds are enduring a terrible season, including now an emphatic loss at their fortress, since Graham has taken up the role as head coach?