All Blacks in the Goldilocks zone
The All Blacks coaches are working through their own version of Goldilocks this week.
Too hard on the players, in the aftermath of the 36-34 loss to South Africa, and they risk denting people’s confidence or having them tune out for the next wee while. Too soft and no-one learns from a defeat that ought to be a good teaching tool.
But get it just right, as assistant coach Ian Foster and the rest of the staff have been attempting to since arriving in Argentina, and you potentially gain benefits that’ll last a season or two.
‘‘In some ways there’s been a bit more heat applied the last couple of days, but in some ways there hasn’t been,’’ Foster said in Buenos Aires yesterday.
‘‘Our job as coaches is to diagnose what we think the issues were and to address them. We feel we’ve done a pretty consistent job of that the last few years, where we’re trying to get the same process whether we win or lose.
‘‘For us, it’s about the performance so every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday we are focusing on stuff that we didn’t think we got quite right so it’s no different from that perspective.
‘‘Yep, it feels a bit worse after a loss, but you’ve got to get over that and get back to the process of what are the key things we need to do to perform better.
‘‘There were some things we needed to see today at training that we had focused on and we’d learnt from the last game. I’m not going to tell you what they are, but what I know is it’s just like every Tuesday; we look hard to make sure we have learned those lessons and so we are pretty happy with where we got to today.’’
You imagine Foster and company are quite hard on the players after victories, in order to prevent complacency.
So what about this week? Do they really let rip or is it more about gentle persuasion, given a few egos were bruised enough by the Springboks?
‘‘I don’t think you can take the emotion right out of it because we are all humans and we all hate losing,’’ Foster said.
‘‘So I don’t think you can deny the fact that it tastes different when you lose, but it’s when that emotion lingers for too long and it clouds your judgment and you start to get into pointing the finger and blame mode [that you get problems].
‘‘That just distracts us as coaches from our job, which is trying to figure out what are the key things we didn’t do right and how are we going to fix them. So you need a little touch of emotion then – it helps – but not too much.’’
At the risk of making it sound like we’re talking about grief counselling here, players have received group and individual feedback following the Springbok defeat.
Again, Foster didn’t elaborate a lot on that, but it sounds as if players such as Beauden Barrett, TJ Perenara and Damian McKenzie, who were responsible for the game management late in proceedings that head coach Steve Hansen has since remarked upon, have been involved in frank discussions.
‘‘Some of those messages were probably a little bit tougher because there was probably a few more things to review,’’ Foster said.
‘‘It was more about sorting out how we were feeling and acted in a few key moments. So that’s not a matter of whipping people, it’s a matter of dissecting what they felt like, where their go to [option] was and how we introduce other thoughts into their head.’’
That’s another thing you need to get just right.
Among Barrett and McKenzie’s great strengths are vision and audacity. You don’t want to stifle that just because neither took a dropped goal a couple of weeks back.
Let’s get it straight – the shoulder charge ban should never be lifted but the NRL judiciary has opened a can of worms in exonerating Billy Slater.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Slater’s case, the NRL will always be suspected of sentimentality in clearing the Melbourne Storm star to play in Sunday’s grand final – the last match of his glittering career.
The NRL will have to be super scrupulous to ensure there is not one rule for a world champion Australian test player with a swag of State of Origin titles and another for a no-name NRL rookie.
Does the game really need a 120kg behemoth using his shoulder to smash a similarsized opponent?
The NRL pointed to scientific studies to prove shoulder charges were becoming more dangerous. It claimed the average G-force from a shoulder charge was 10.682 compared to 6.056 from a head-on tackle where the defender led with his arms.
The NRL banned the shoulder charge after evidence showed the average G-force from one is 10.682 compared to 6.056 from the conventional front-on tackle. Shoulder charges, it said, were 76 per cent greater in impact.
Clearly, the ban was introduced to stop the front-on tackle where a defender, often running at full speed, used his shoulder for a high hit on a ball carrier. The veto was aimed at protecting players’ heads.
As a general rule, the shoulder charge ban has been effective with a zero tolerance policy invoked.
There are still shoulder charges in the heat of the moment – remember Ben Te’o’s on Sonny Bill Williams in the 2014 NRL elimination final?
But the number of offences has declined. In 2014, 11 shoulder chargers were carpeted. A year later there were three.
The Canberra Raiders’ Kiwi forward Joe Tapine was banned for two games this year for a grade one shoulder charge.
Offenders generally get short shrift from the judiciary. Until now.
It’s easy to say, as Fittler and other have, that a shoulder charge is a shoulder charge and Slater should have been suspended because clearing him