New Zealand vs England – Focus on Englands Defensive Woes
Alas it was not to be, 3-0 to New Zealand. Expected? Maybe so, but England must have hoped for a test win. They showed a lot of encouraging signs but for all their endeavor they still came up significantly short. Combative yes, competitive, yes, but for about 30-40 minutes of the test series New Zealand tore England apart with attacking Rugby that exposed huge flaws in their game. Defence has been a big part of England's...
Shooting Stars – Saracens Defensive System
Last week as part of our article on the quarter final between Saracens and Clermont I mentioned the amount of plaudits the Saracens defence had received and i wanted to come back and have a quick look at why it’s been getting so much attention. Lots of focus has been placed on the ferociousness of individual hits and the “Wolfpack” mentality they have made a key component in their defence system. In the Clermont game...
Kicking the Habit – The need for tactical Kicking
After their demolition of ASM Clermont Auvergne a lot of the focus has been on Saracens defensive system. Understandably so, and we’ll focus on that later on this week, but something that was equally telling for me in predicting the outcome of the game was their ability to dominate the kicking game. We all know big games can turn on very little things, and one of those occurred about 4 minutes into the game. Saracens...
Low Phase Scoring – Six Nations 2014
Above is a short video highlighting the scoring speed after gaining possession from the first round of the Six Nations. So how many phases does it take to score a try? There is no right or wrong answer, but a statistic I found really interesting from this year’s six nations was that from the 61 trys, scored in this year’s Six Nations only around 5 were scored using more than 5 phases. Now, I’m no mathematician but...
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