It should be easier to win against 14 men!
Brendan Gallagher looks at why shorthanded teams are winning so many games after seeing red
What’s going on? In the past six months at least six big games have been won by the shorthanded team who have had their best-laid plans disrupted by a seemingly – at first – disastrous early sending off.
Racing 92 made light of the dismissal of Maxime Machenaud to win the T14 final against Toulon; Ireland marched to victory in the first Test against South Africa after CJ Stander saw red and an emotional Munster marked Tony Foley’s sad death with a win over Glasgow despite Keith Earls being sent off.
Eliot Daly, meanwhile, might have been sent off after just five minutes against the Pumas but that didn’t stop England winning 27-14 at Twickenham, Fiji shrugged off the early sending-off of No.8 Paceli Yato to defeat Japan 38-25 and only last week Montpellier marched to victory over Castres in the Champions Cup even though star prop Davit Kubriashvili went for an early bath.
At first glance it makes little sense. Most self-respecting professional rugby teams reckon to score at least one try, possibly two, when their opponents are disadvantaged by going down to 14 men for just ten minutes when there is a yellow card so why, in so many games recently, has that numerical advantage not proved decisive when extended to an hour or more?
The perceived wisdom has always been that it is easier to absorb the loss of an outside back in that it doesn’t impact on your pack and half-backs in any way. As long as those units stay strong and a team are capable of executing a more limited gameplan there is still hope.
You can possiblyapply this theory in the instance of Earls and Daly but of the other four cases three are absolute key forwards and the other – Machenaud – a scrum-half, goal kicker and tactical linchpin around whom the Racing game revolved. So what’s the story?
First complacency is sometimes and issue. It shouldn’t be but it is. When a side go down to 14 men, the team with 15 still on the park automatically go up a level. They scent blood and know they have got just ten minutes to make hay. During that period the adrenaline flows and they max out. It’s time to ram home the advantage.
Yet perversely when a side go down to 14 men, incurring a red card after say 15 minutes, it feels very different. Often there isn’t quite the same urgency from the side still with 15 players to go for the jugular there and then. Indeed on many occasions the first thing they do is visibly relax. Haven’t they got the best part of 65 minutes to make the advantage tell? The numbers game will favour them in the end, just stay patient and the sending-off will eventually take a toll.
Wrong. Well not always but often. Such an approach can be very dangerous because losing a player early on can be very galvanising for the shorthanded team.
Let’s reduce it to simple mathematics. Before such a dismissal you can have 15 players operating at say 90 per cent efficiency and capacity, ticking over but not quite firing on all four cylinders. Then that side lose a player early on and are staring down the barrel. Suddenly their heckles rise plus they might be feeling aggrieved and extra motivated if they believe it was a bad call.
What can then happen is that the 14 players operate eyeballs out at 100 per cent for the remainder of the game. Now you don’t have to be Einstein to appreciate that 14 individuals at 100 per cent can be more effective than 15 players at 90 per cent.
Then there is the sheer stupidity and poor tactical play of some teams. Five minutes into their big match of the autumn at Twickenham and Argentina had England just where they wanted, down to 14 men. The absolute priority was not to let England off the hook, keep disciplined, don’t give them any easy get-outs.
And what did they do? The Pumas found a way of conceding 17 penalties, that’s 17 bonus bits of possession and territory for 14-man England, 17 occasions when they could dictate the play. Manna from heaven for the shorthanded team.
Referees, and how they officiate after sending a player off, also have a big influence here in these situations and ‘playing’ the ref can become a nuanced art.
If a referee has just sent somebody off with an hour or so of a showpiece occasion left with a massive crowd gathered and the TV millions wanting a fair contest its very unlikely that subconsciously that won’t affect his subsequent control of a game, especially if that dismissal was a close call and it is preying on his mind.
There will be a very natural tendency to give the short-handed side the 50-50 calls and the first thing a side must do when they go down to 14 is to start seriously courting the referee. Get him back on side, work on that very human subconscious desire to equalise the game just a tad. Get him pinging the opposition.
Another factor that needs to be considered is that the reshuffle after a sending-off can sometimes seriously change a team’s modus operandi and make them more effective on the day as players step up to the plate.
When Machenaud went off in the T14 final Racing took the radical step of moving Juan Imhoff from wing to scrum-half.
Many shook their heads but Imhoff, a world-class 15s wing for the Pumas who had recently played scrum-half for the Pumas Sevens team, was a man inspired. He posed a totally different and unexpected running threat to Machenaud which took Toulon, and in particular their backrow, by surprise.
It also meant Racing, with Machenaud off and Carter not fit for kicking duties, had to turn to their third choice goalkicker – Johan Goosen – a long range specialist who was given his head and landed a couple of boomers that Racing might not even have considered had Machenaud stayed on.
And just occasionally the explanation is very easy. Or rather none is needed. When Munster ran out in front of a packed Thomond Park to play Glasgow just 24 hours after the burial of Tony Foley up the road in Killaloe there was no force on this earth that was going to stop Munster winning that game.
Munster collectively were going to produce the games of their lives and deliver the victory that the occasion demanded. Glasgow could have been playing against 12 men that day and they still were not going to win that game, end of story. The dismissal of Keith Earls made not a jot of difference.