It’s simple, faster you are to the breakdown the bigger impact
“Velocity equals mass: In other words, the quicker you are the bigger the impact”
Isn’t it strange how every time the RFU think they have the right man and give an extension to his contract, the wheels fall off the wagon? From the RFU’s first professional manager, Clive Woodward, through to today’s incumbent Eddie Jones, a few games after the announcement of a long-term commitment by both parties everything seems to start unravelling.
Eddie’s team have been on an upward curve from the dour World Cup performance of 2015, but now seem to have lost direction. Have the players really lost the plot or is it something else? It would seem coaching in the modern game is a far more complex issue than it used to be.
Players were expected to hone their skills at club level with one of the most important assets being decisionmaking, which left a coach to concentrate on a playing style and picking the players to match.
However, it now seems the players are coached what to do in every foreseeable situation, and appear unable to make any ‘heads up’ decisions themselves.
In other words, they seem to have lost the ability to play what is in front of them, sticking to a pre-instructed plan, even when it’s not working. This is a coaching fault, which does not relate to the players’ abilities.
The best example came last year when Italy didn’t join the rucks and the England players asked referee Jerome Garcia what to do, prompting him to reply, ‘I am not your coach’.
The same is true of the Scotland game where the players were too regimented in how they approached the breakdown and failed to adapt when what they had trained for failed to work.
I don’t know if Jones is an avid reader of this paper but it was good to hear he now appears to agree with my view that training with a particular referee doesn’t necessarily help, as each referee may have different interpretations of the breakdown, etc.
His latest assertion that England must increase power at the breakdown and break tackles to create opportunities, seems to be in defence of his selection policy, but it is very shortsighted.
Scotland were far less physically powerful than the England team they faced, just as there is no way that Japan were ever going to be as physical as South Africa – but what both these teams understood is you don’t have to pick big physical players to be powerful!
Jones may have misquoted Newton with his ‘without power you get no momentum’ but what he should have been misquoting is Einstein’s velocity equals mass. In other words, the quicker you are the bigger the impact.
As I have said before, speed is the essence of a successful modern game, the quicker you can get players to the breakdown, the greater chance you will have of a successful outcome, either in recycling quick ball or turning the ball over.
Speed of play also makes it harder for teams to get back into defensive alignment, creating holes to potentially run into.
Jones has said it will take around 18 months to fix the problem of the breakdown but I think he is wrong. The problem is not about fixing in a coaching sense, or retraining players to play a different game, it’s about selection,
As England coach he has the biggest pool of players available in world rugby and, as such, he can, and does, choose his squad dependant on the style of rugby he wants to play.
Currently he has chosen to select an all powerful group with little thought of a different strategy, but he could just as easily change that in his next EPS selection. This could include a number of new backrow players who play in the traditional roles of the back row: natural open-side flankers, blindside flankers and No.8s.
He has toyed with Josh Beaumont, the Curry brothers, Sam Underhill and others, but Jones chose his style of play and picked his big boys. However, as ever, other teams learn and now know his game and have adapted, which, along with the breakdown changes, has led to England’s current demise.
Yesterday’s result really doesn’t matter one way or the other because the damage was done by losing to Scotland and France, the two nations perceived as the weakest (after Italy) in the Six Nations. Those losses took away something that Jones had been building, something that was making England the next All Blacks – an air of invincibility.
So although I believe fixing the problem of the breakdown is quite simple and should be done before England’s summer tour of South Africa , rebuilding that illusion of strength is a different matter.
The other area that puzzles me is the Ford/ Farrell axis. Surely the idea of having two fly-halves is to be able to sometimes split the field with one each side of the set piece or breakdown, creating space by splitting the defence?
If, as Jones has, you just use them in the traditional fly-half/inside-centre roles, you are wasting both opportunity and talent.
If England are to get on the front foot, they will need both if they are to turn around Eddie’s broken dream.