Jones made the wrong call by staying in Durban
England should have got longer to acclimatise to the Highveld’s altitude, writes Mike Davison
Eddie Jones will have surely faced a dilemma in his choice of training base for England during the South African tour. Head for the thinner air of the Highveld, disrupt sleep patterns and thus impact on the intensity of pre-match training and recovery; or stay at sea level and risk hitting a respiratory wall in the second half of the game at Ellis Park.
Sat on the plane back to their seaside base in Durban, Jones may be ruing the decision not to stay high and benefiting from the acclimatisation effect. Ellis Park is situated at around 1,800metres, enough to make players take sharp breaths and affect playing intensity. At high altitudes, where the atmospheric pressure is lower and the air is less dense, oxygen molecules are further apart and more difficult to breathe into the vascular system. The availability of oxygen to muscles becomes lower.
Players tend to run around seven kilometres and make about 120 sprints per match. Each effort requires that the player recover, and the reduced availability of oxygen impairs this. The only solution is to prepare for the situation by allowing the body to adapt to the lower oxygen levels.
Full acclimatisation probably takes more than two weeks, but for moderate altitudes like those in South Africa, five to seven days is widely thought to be sufficient.
Studies have shown that teams based at sea level but playing at altitude were more likely to miss tackles. In the second half of games, sea-level teams at altitude were also likely to make fewer gain-line breaks compared with the second half of games at sea level.
If, however, a team decide to sleep and train low, as England have, the key is to then decide when to arrive. Most Super Rugby teams will seek to arrive as close to kick-off as possible. Arriving on Thursday, as England did last week, was perhaps too early.
Mike Davison is managing director of Isokinetic London. Elliot Daly’s catastrophic failure to ground the ball after S’busiso Nkosi’s grubber kick-started a spell of three tries in nine minutes for South Africa. Nkosi is lurking but Daly has a clear couple of seconds to dive on the ball unchallenged. Instead, the ball slips under his body, giving Nkosi an open goal to score his first Test try. This was Daly’s second error, having kicked out on the full before South Africa’s first try.