Canes at ease with set pieces
The hue and cry over the Hurricanes’ set-piece was unjustified.
Look inside the numbers and, apparently, you’ll find the scrums and lineouts weren’t so bad on Saturday night.
To the untrained eye it appeared the set-pieces bordered on a liability, as the Crusaders ground out a fairly dominant 20-12 victory. In actual fact the Hurricanes’ performance was just about as sound as it’s ever been.
‘‘[Scrum coach] Dan Cron went back and looked at our success rate against the Crusaders in the last five years, on our completion rate across the scrum and lineout, and it was within about two per cent of what it normally is,’’ Hurricanes head coach Chris Boyd said.
‘‘He also had a look at the setpiece completion rate against the Crusaders over the last five games and ours was the best of the last five games. So what it tells us is - as you’d expect from a team that’s got five All Blacks in the front five and six All Blacks in the pack, and they’re probably the All Blacks’ starting front row if Colesy’s [Dane Coles] not right - is that it’s not acceptable but [that] we went about how we normally would.’’
The Hurricanes’ scrummaging success rate on Saturday was about 70 per cent, Boyd said.
Along the way, though, there weren’t just occasions when the Crusaders shunted them off their ball, but referee Jaco Peyper penalised them to boot.
‘‘We didn’t necessarily agree with all those decisions,’’ said Boyd. ‘‘The way Jaco referees the scrum, he’s very focused on the dominant side. The question would be how are they dominant?
‘‘It’s not really my area to be honest, but our guys think we were hard done by in probably half of those penalties.’’
Peyper isn’t the only referee who can err on the side of the scrum going forward, but Boyd doubts future whistle-blowers will hold Saturday night’s struggles against the Hurricanes.
‘‘We don’t have to go very far back to where our scrum performed very well against the Brumbies and Waratahs, who were supposed to be really good scrums,’’ he said.
‘‘We got dished up three times in our set-piece last year; the Brumbies, the Reds and the Crusaders and we had really good performances this year against the Reds and the Brumbies.’’
The lack of good ball from the scrum and lineout appeared to limit what the backs could do against the Crusaders. Boyd, though, said that ‘‘wasn’t in itself the problem.’’
‘‘The fact that we also didn’t dominate the collision areas, we also didn’t dominate the territory and we also had 30 skill-execution mistakes [contributed too]. So I guess the big question we’re asking is whether we tried to play too much rugby.’’
Saturday’s clash with the Cheetahs won’t provide the answer. We’ll have to wait until the last two round robin games against the Chiefs on June 9 and then the Crusaders after the test match window - to find that out.