No country for slow men
Decision to drop Owen Franks for Atu Moli indicates that mobility is favoured over scrummaging stability
The layman’s read on the Rugby World Cup squad will be that in dropping Owen Franks for Atu Moli, the All Blacks are risking scrummaging stability for greater mobility.
Franks hasn’t convinced at any stage in his career as a natural ball player with the athletic instincts of the likes of Charlie Faumuina or John Afoa, but there has never been any dispute that judged exclusively on the core roles of scrummaging, lineout lifting and cleaning out rucks, he has no peer.
Need a man to scrum and it would be Franks every time. Even now there will be a nationwide edginess that the All Blacks have decided to go to a Rugby World Cup without a man who has earned 108 caps on his ability to thanklessly and relentlessly channel thousands of pounds of pressure through his spine for the greater good.
The All Blacks coaches, however, wouldn’t agree about the level of risk they have taken by jettisoning the man who has more test caps than the five they have picked combined.
They would argue that with the five props they have picked, the All Blacks scrum will be every bit the weapon they expect it to be.
There has been no compromise in leaving out Franks in their minds as any combination of Joe Moody, Nepo Laulala, Angus Ta’avao, Ofa Tu’ungafasi and Moli can produce the goods come set-piece time.
Stick any two of that five in the front-row and the All Blacks will be confident they can hold their own against the heavyweight work of England, South Africa, Ireland and Wales.
All of those five can scrummage well enough, so the coaches believe, to ensure the All Blacks have the power and technical know-how to win penalties at the set-piece should they be needed or to hold things steady enough to set for a drop goal should it be required.
Laulala after all was on the field when the All Blacks destroyed the Wallabies with seven men and Tu’ungafasi is rated internally as the strongest and most technically correct scrummager in the country.
So the coaches would dispute they have taken a risk to gain a reward in general play.
But they would agree entirely that the omission of Franks does give them a reward of greater ball carrying, more dynamic tackling and higher work-rate across the park.
And they will argue that they can’t win this tournament without the men wearing numbers one and three — and indeed the bench players — contributing significantly more than they did in 2018.
Mobility is clearly where the All Blacks see the real battle playing out in Japan.
On the hard grounds, with rush defences the order of the day, the All Blacks have concluded they can’t attack with just 13 men.
They need 15 players on their feet. They need 15 men who are comfortable on the ball — know how to give and take a pass and see it as being as much a core role as their work in the scrum.
They need their props to be urgent, to be available to carry and the stats built up by the likes of Ta’avao and Tu’ungafasi — both of whom carried and tackled prolifically during the Rugby Championship — are now the benchmark.
The big let down for the All Blacks coaches last year was that their props — all of them — were too slow to get off the ground once they had made a tackle.
They were too slow to realign and get themselves into useful positions to contribute in either attack or defence and none of them was hungry enough to get his hands on the ball and force the defence into dealing with him.
Outside of the set-piece last year, the All Blacks props were mostly passengers, almost a kind of special unit team that only functioned at scrum and lineout time.
The All Blacks suffered as a result. They didn’t do enough damage around the fringes of the ruck. Didn’t make enough tackles either and often when they strung the phases together, they ran out of ball carriers as the bigger units weren’t working hard enough to be involved.
In stark contrast, England and Ireland especially were seeing their props run like loose forwards, pass and catch like backs and get to their feet with the sort of speed that suggested the ground may have been on fire.
Those last weeks of the season confirmed to the coaches what they were starting to see in the Rugby Championship, that their props had fallen behind in work rate and contribution.
This message about the need for more was delivered earlier this year ahead of Super Rugby, but obviously not well enough understood by Franks who has been deemed to have fallen short on expectations.
His omission has sent a powerful message to the rest of the world about how the All Blacks want to play in Japan
And also to the five props selected that there will be zero tolerance of those who don’t see beyond the setpiece.