Rugby Union Should Be About Position, Not Possession

Eddie Jones, the new head coach of the English rugby team, hopped a ball during the week by accusing Ireland of being boring. For a man rebuilding England in the shape of the pack-dominated great English teams of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, this is a rich slice of fruit cake indeed.

However. The loquacious Aussie larrikin has spoken a truth that dare not speak its name. It is this: modern rugby union would bore the britches off a Scotch Presbyterian. It is horrible. When rugby was an amateur game, what was good rugby and what wasn’t was an ongoing discussion. Now, all is schtum, and nobody must speak ill of the crash-bang-boom game.

The origin myth of rugby is of William Webb-Ellis, bored by the football played at Rugby public school, one day picked up the ball and ran with it. And that is what rugby union is meant to be – carrying the ball and running with it.

But not only is that not what modern rugby is about, picking up the ball and running to daylight is not something you can do in modern rugby. Once you have the ball, you are to look up, find the most convenient member of the opposition, and run right at him, eschewing daylight for a ruck. And another ruck. And another, and another, in perpetuity.

Rugby used to be a game of field position. Now it’s a game of possession, and those two games are fundamentally different. Soccer or Gaelic from the 1970s looks different to the modern games, but 70s rugby and modern rugby obviously, blatantly, clearly different games.

Mike Gibson’s first thought on receiving the ball has to have been fundamentally different to Rob Henshaw’s, even though they both play at inside centre. Rugby is not the game as it was. And the change is devolution, rather than evolution.

Certain rugby pundits sneered at some years ago at Warren Gatland’s Wales as being Warrenball, based on the sheer beef of that human cannonball Jamie Roberts at inside centre.

But reader, Warrenball wins Grand Slams and Lions Tours. Who doesn’t play Warrenball anymore? Where is the team that runs now? The French, the British Lions and Fiji were the one-time great exponents of running rugby. The French can barely field a team any more, as the Top 14 teams/franchises have turned out to be the farrow that ate their sow.

The British “and Irish” Lions, whose very survival this long into the professional era, are on their last legs. South Africa will have fallen into the abyss by the time the next tour there rolls around there and not only could the ‘Stralians not give a stuff about the Lions, Australia only became a tour venue for the Lions when the International Board finally decided to effect the Apartheid ban on South Africa nearly twenty years after it was introduced.

Fiji have no players left, as anyone any good at all is shamelessly and shamefully poached by the New Zealanders before he’s old enough to shave more often than once a week.

And so we have the situation now that rugby union has become a poor man’s rugby league, a biff-bang-boom game, a crash-bang-wallop game, where men too big for their natural frames to support repeatedly crash into each other like a thirty-ball Newton’s Cradle on the grass of Cardiff, of Edinburgh, of Dunedin and divers arenas to many to count, and then wonder why their careers are cut short by injury.

The domestic Welsh rugby competition plans to experiment with new rules. A six-point try (point inflation in the value of the try in rugby union – there’s a project for aspirant rugby statisticians), and two points for every kick at goals. Persistent fouling at the breakdown to be punished by much more liberal use of the yellow card.

Reduced value for kicks, fewer players on the field for the majority of the game and a simpler breakdown? They know that style of rugby in Widnes, Wigan and Hull, but rugby union it ain’t.

Is there no hope for rugby union, then? Should we just bury the thing and move on? Of course not. Rugby Union through its history has been good – much better than the GAA, for instance – at revising its laws to make sure the correct balance is struck between teams’ efforts to win and the spirit, the genius of the game.

We see it now with constant tweaks on the laws at the breakdown, but the game underwent its most dramatic transformation at the end of the ‘sixties when the game was stagnating, just as it is now. Players could only kick for touch on the full from behind their own 22-metre line. A kick that went out on the full became a scrum back, and rugby began its greatest-ever era.

What can be done now to save the game, just as the penalising of the kick on the full saved the game in the 1970s? A suggestion, for your consideration.

Restore the scrum and lineout as contested entities. A scrum won against the head is a rarity in modern rugby, the reason being that the ball is never put into the scrum straight. The straight put-in is still in the rules. Why not enforce it?

The way to restore competition in the lineout is to ban lifting. At the time of its introduction, lifting in the lineout had already been legalised in South Africa during the Springboks’ exile, and a sneaky lift was quite common in the game in general. But the lifting that took place then was nothing compared to the military discipline exercised at the lineout now. For one hundred years, the lineout was a contested entity. Now, a lineout is guaranteed possession.

Could it be that the current emphasis in rugby on possession rather than position is an accidental consequence of lifting in the lineout? Isn’t it the lineout that gives rise to modern truck-and-trailer rolling maul, another blight on the game? If so, a simple banning of lifting in the lineout will make teams think for themselves once again, and maybe bring some sort of spontaneity back to the game. Why not try it? What have they got to lose?

Advantage Gatland in the Mind Game

If there were a Geneva Convention for pre-match banter, Welsh coach Warren Gatland would be getting a stern letter this week from Mr Ban Ki-Moon. Gatland’s remarks during the week about the Welsh hating the Irish was the equivalent of some African warlord dropping a dose of beriberi onto one of his neighbours from the clear blue sky, with a spot of whooping cough thrown in for luck.

What’s particularly tricky to figure out about what Gatland said is that the Welsh don’t hate the Irish at all. The Welsh hate the English, just like everybody else. The English hate the French, themselves, and the French, naturally enough, hate them back.

So why then did Gatland say it if it’s patently not so?

He said it because Gatland is a master of psychological warfare. Gatland lived in Ireland long enough to pick up a few traits about the Irish psyche, and the particular one that he’s thinking about here is the tremendous Irish need to be loved.

It’s not enough for Ireland to win a Grand Slam, even though Ireland haven’t won one for sixty-one years. There is a tremendous need for the Irish to be acknowledged as a great as well. If we don’t get the pat on the head, the nation pouts like a teenager.

If we stepped back a little, we could see that glory and Grand Slams are not necessarily the same thing. David Sole’s Grand Slam team of 1990 – and it by no means An Spailpín’s intention to have a cut at the Scots, God love them – were by no means a glorious team but the record book shows 1990, Grand Slam, Scotland, and that’s all that counts.

Gatland is clearly fully aware of this insecurity in the Irish psyche, this tremendous need. He’s also aware of that word that rhymes with poke, and joke, and coke, and the Irish connection with same over the years. So, like Begbie in Trainspotting throwing the glass over the stairs to see what would happen, Gatland has rolled his hand grenade in under the Irish door and walked away laughing.

He’s a sly dog, Gatland. The Irish are blessed in that Declan Kidney is no eejit either, but it is a sad truth that teams have been psyched out of games before by soft chat in the press, and England are the most famous example of that.

Brian Moore has been unfairly criticised in Ireland for calling the Irish chokers two years ago, but anyone who took the trouble to read what he wrote will notice that Moore was upfront about why it bothered him so much. Because Moore himself was hooker and pack leader on the England team that choked against Scotland in 1990, and then choked again against Australia in the World Cup Final the year after.

The story bears repeating. 1988 was a red-letter year in English rugby. The selectors finally did away with the Corinthian ethos that saw quality players being regularly dropped for fear of chaps getting too big for their boots, and instead boiled their rugby right down to brass tacks. Rob Andrew kicked the ball ahead of their pack and bad men like Mickey Teague and Wade Dooley chased after it, giving no quarter to whomever or whatever got in their way.

By 1991 England were unstoppable, grinding their way through opposition like so many locusts fed exclusively on bully beef. In the World Cup Final that year, England faced their antithesis, Australia, a flair team epitomised by the mercurial David Campese on the wing, one of the greatest players ever to play the game.

Campese knew that Australia stood no chance in a battle in the trenches with England. So he spent the week before the final giving interview after interview saying that England were destroying the game with their ten man game and it broke his bloody heart to think of the game he loved, a game about boys running with ball in hand and the wind in their hair, being crushed by the fearsome hooves of the yeomanry.

All balls, of course. Australia is not a rugby nation. They’d play League if only they were let, and they’re doing their damnedest to turn Union into League with those cursed ELVs.

But Campese was an exceptional talent, and a masterful student of the human condition. Campese looked into the soul of English rugby and saw Roundheads who wanted to be Cavaliers. Campese’s goading caused England to change their gameplan as they tried to play the Australians at the Australian game in the final. England were wiped out, Campese laughed his way back to Australia with the Webb Ellis Trophy under his arm, and Brian Moore is still bitter eighteen years on.

The parallel is not exact but the level of psychological insight is the same – sublime. And worse, the last time Ireland played for a Grand Slam they fell for another psychological trick. The Irish huffed and puffed over the insult to our President in 2003, but if they were that upset they would have trooped off and let the International Board sort it out. But the Irish are too afraid of being unpopular, so they let Johnson pull their pigtails, and then payed the price when the game began.

This same need to be loved is what Warren Gatland is playing on so expertly now. How will Ireland respond?





Technorati Tags: sport, rugby, Six Nations, Ireland, Wales, Grand Slam, Warren Gatland

IRFU Adopt Soviet Five Year Plan Strategy, Apparently

An Spailpín Fánach is utterly stunned at the announcement today that Eddie O’Sullivan has been appointed Ireland coach until 2012. 2012! And this before a ball is kicked in the World Cup!

The Union points out in the release that they did the same thing in 2003, giving Eddie a vote of confidence before the World Cup. But they do not point out that the reason for that was because it was still less than two years since they hung Warren Gatland out to dry. The IRFU had made their bed and they then had to lie in it.

But this is four years on, when people are gradually beginning to see the hype of the past year or eighteen months for what it was, and will be watching the World Cup with a much more critical eye than heretofore. So for the IRFU to batten down the hatches like this smacks of nothing so much as the deal that the FAI made with Mick McCarthy before the soccer World Cup in Japan. And we all know how well that worked out.

It’s tempting to wonder if this new contract includes a get-out clause should O’Sullivan be offered the Lions job in 2009 when they tour South Africa. O’Sullivan is the long-time front runner (clever Eddie having skilfully disassociated himself from the 2005 debacle by by leaving Sir Clive to swing slowly in the wind), and we have confirmation of this favoritism in O’Sullivan’s appointment as coach to the Barbarians in December (whose brand has no proved as lasting in the professional era as the Lions’, more’s the pity). Your correspondent will bet good money that get-out clause exists, but An Spailpín doesn’t think it will come to that – it’s hard not to get the sinking feeling that there won’t be too much Emerald Green in the Lions’ squad by the time 2009 comes around. How very depressing.

FOCAL SCOIR: Anybody know how Gatland got on since he got the bullet here for being no good? What’s that? Three English Rugby Premiership titles in a row with London Wasps, a Heineken Cup with Wasps as well and an inaugural Air New Zealand Cup with Waikato last year? Clearly a bum – we’re well shot of him.





Technorati Tags: sport, rugby, Eddie O'Sullivan, Warren Gatland