A view from the South Stand (God's own spot)

oddshapedballs
By Oddshaped Balls
April 19 2006

It’s a slow day today, both at work and on the message board, so I have taken some time over my lunch break to order a few of my thoughts.

From where I sat on Friday evening and around the bars in the South Stand and in the Rodbar, there were three hot topics of conversation: Defensive Organisation, the Butchering of Overlaps and Playing to “Today’s Interpretation of the Law”.

Taking the last first, we were completely and thoroughly done in some crucial areas. Somebody will know where and how to find statistics for turnovers at ruck and maul. The penalty count at this phase was approximately equal and, I suspect, paltry compared with other matches we have played this season. Foxy and Chicken, had they had time to think about it, would have had forced smiles at some of the things going on; the sorts of things for which they have been roundly criticised as major concessions of penalties. On Friday? Silence.

We did not (perhaps, were not able) to mess up and/or steal Leicester ball with anything like the facility they did it to our possession. This part of the game was being played fairly and squarely in the grey area and we seemed only to be able to play in black or white. Had someone else, say, Mr Barnes, had the whistle, there would have been howls of protest at his lack of management of the breakdown. Spreadbury is a different kettle of fish, known for his desire for an open and free-flowing game. He penalised just enough to prevent the idea that it might be a free-for-all and turn and turn about so that neither team should feel badly done-to. Yet we managed to lose this phase comprehensively.

One of the turnovers yielded the ball for Tuilagi’s try. Two things happened there. We were caught high up the field with Bruce committed to attack and Leicester moved it quickly to the nearer wide channel. When Monty gambled on the interception and lost, it was Tuilagi against two forwards trying to close down the touch-line with Bruce racing against hope to cut him off at the corner.

I was amused by the assertion of a fellow spectator at half time that Bruce should have “got the shoulder in”. Absolutely! I am sure he would agree but as he had charged 70-odd metres at an unpromising angle, dived full length and still managed only an ankle-tap, I suspect the shoulder was a couple of strides away from the action.

Rather than bang on about the shortcomings in our defensive organisation. There was plenty of evidence again when a dropped pass here and one that went into touch there saved our last line from an even more rigorous examination. What was really noticeable was the difference in what the Americans would call coverage.

The worst-kept secret in the rugby world is the momentum generated by our middle-five. We have seen teams try to counteract this threat by flooding the tight channels with defenders and relying on traditional methods to get the numbers wide.

Leicester didn’t defend with over-the-top numbers. The defended, as near as makes no difference, man-for-man. Loose forwards didn’t go all over the field hunting for Carlos Spencer and scrambling across to an unmarked Lamont or Cohen. The defence was already in place. There were no 4 on 1s to exploit and no 2 on 1s either.

Were Leicester’s attacking ambitions or ploys superior to ours? Only by investing too much importance to the loading of both wingers to the open-side wing would you come to a definite positive conclusion.

Did their midfield break the line more often than Spencer, Reihana and Clarke? Another one for the statisticians but I’d say it was unlikely.

You wouldn’t even go across the back-line and say that man-for-man Leicester backs were better individual defenders yet to the evidence of all eyes – not to mention the scoreboard – our defence was short-handed and stretched while theirs gobbled up the pressure.

Whatever our defence is trying to achieve, there have been too many times this season that the system has broken and allowed easy tries. There have been individual errors, too, but, while disappointing the odd slip-up here and there has only contributed to a rather embarrassing count of tries against rather than anything else.

Both aspects need work – the system probably requires the sort of overhaul that can only be achieved during the off season. If the system starts to work, it is almost a given that the individual errors will decline.

Finally, why do we fail to take advantage of apparent mismatches in numbers? Having seen Havili, Finau and Varndell all cross our whitewash without a defender even being close enough to take down particulars, it becomes a bit of a thorn in your side when our own team seems unable to reciprocate.

Most of what I have seen, the spectators that criticise have not appreciated a number of factors. Quite often we have been in a narrow channel and while we may have an extra pair of hands, there isn’t the time or space to draw and give such that the last man will get the free run.

On other occasions there is a mismatch with more of our attackers against their front-line defence. When this is between the two 10-metre lines, you can almost guarantee that cover and deep defence are moving across to snuff out the danger.

There are added frustrations in this latter case because one of the ball-carriers will attempt something that stops the second and third line of defence from drifting on to the last man. One of the most frequent ploys is for the man in the outside centre channel to take responsibility for the attack. Assuming – like John Clarke or Bruce Reihana – this man breaks the line, what happens in immediate aftermath is crucial to the success or failure of the attack.

A straight run-in is terribly rugby league – one strong line of defence and no cover – the line-break is everything. This tends not to happen so much in our game. There is cover and if it gets hold of the attacker it can rob him of the ball.

What generally happens is the man that makes the break loses a bit of his momentum and any cover is drawn towards him. Anybody in the defensive line will try to insinuate themselves between the ball-carrier and the remnants of the attacking line. If the attacking line stays in place it is ready to prosecute the next stage of the attack but it can be screened from the ball-carrier by one or two defenders.

What the ball carrier wants – desperately – is for a man to follow him through the same gap and appear on his shoulder to pick up the off-load. Too often either nobody follows through the gap or, when they do, they pass the ball-carrier before the ball is off-loaded.

To remind yourself how it can work summon up images of Bruce cutting in from the wing against Narbonne to appear on Carlos’s inside shoulder and his repeat dose: the “Take my breath away” try against Bath; Sam Harding epitomising everything Neil Back wasn’t as he nailed other people’s breaks in the early part of the New Year.

We have done the overlap trick ourselves, too. Cohen and Reihana (the other one) against Bath but we tend to remember when Daniel Browne was all but through and the support lined up to the right, all neatly behind the sole defender on that side, and nobody came through the gap.

You can only use a broadsword when you have the room to swing it; at close quarters you need to use the rapier.

There is absolutely no doubt that we could and maybe should do better. To my mind there is no doubt that we can and will do better.

For the mostpart this season we have dragged ourselves away from the point where one or two errors were costing us dearly – the penalty count, the kicking percentage, the puzzling refereeing decision – to where we are not just in every game we are a threat in them all.

I doubt we will ever get to the stage where every mismatch is exploited to the full; or, the defence is never outflanked; or, we are the most streetwise bunch in the Premiership. But we can look forward knowing that Budge and Grayse can conjure at least half a season’s performance out of this bunch of players and they can and do play some wonderful stuff.