McCullum’s winnin your players, not th G way: Trust e process
The dead have been dancing this summer. England’s cricket team won four successive matches by chasing targets that veered from the unlikely to the never been done before. A team that only last winter batted in strait-jackets and bowled in far looser grab shed its wardrobe for something more colourful and dashing. Under a new coach and captain, one word was uttered above any other: attack.
And so Alex Lees, an opening batsman who in West Indies could barely hit the ball off the square, came down the wicket to one of the world’s leading pace bowlers, Mohammed Shami, three balls into his innings as England set about a target of 378 at Edgbaston, a total they had never reached before in a chase, and smoked a boundary. The message was clear.
A team that in recent years had often scored below three runs an over was flaying attacks for 4.5. Many supporters of the England rugby union and football teams yearn for the same shedding of shackles: the one struggles to find the net and the other does not score enough tries. Joe Root was the captain of the England cricket team that disappeared without trace in Australia and West Indies but, back among the ranks, he is in supreme form with the bat. All he carries now is his own talent.
“We are in the entertainment business,” he said when asked to explain the difference a few months have made. “It should be fun. We are trying to engage with the public and make Test cricket enjoyable. We want the next generation to love it like we do and I hope that the way we are playing makes that more of a possibility.”
He said that the change had not come about through extra net sessions or conditioning training. “It has been about mentality, not technique,” he went on. “It is about recognising different moments in the game and managing risk well. You are always looking for ways to improve, but the emphasis in training has been on fun.”
The mentality is about aiming high and maximising potential, encouraging players to draw on every last trace of their ability and not worry about the consequences of failure. Don’t think about failure, just go out there and do it.
“Don’t worry about failure just go out there and do it”
In contrast, the England rugby and football teams seem to be operating not just with the handbrake on but the engine in neutral. Courtney Lawes’s team did score three tries in Perth in last weekend’s first Test against Australia, but two came in the final minute when the result had been decided and all that needed to be settled was the margin of victory.
Rugby is a different sport to cricket, but mentality crosses borders. Last year, England’s head coach Eddie Jones talked about new England and unstructured attacks, but selection has continued to be predicated on filling in for the absent Manu Tuilagi. Where was the pace in Perth? Jonny May had Covid, but wings like Adam Radwan, Cadan Murley and Ollie Hassell-Collins had been overlooked. Joe Cokanasiga, who has had little rugby since the last World Cup because of injuries, was picked because of his size. And then dropped having made minimal impact.
England found themselves caught between their controlling, structured game of old and a flair personified by Marcus Smith. A few hours later in Pretoria, Wales came within a couple of minutes of defeating and then drawing with the World Cup holders South Africa, drawing inspiration from a performance that was high on heart and effort but low on risk. It was an opportunity lost by Wales not proof of a recovery after the home defeat to Italy. Wales had before that match come closer than anyone to defeating France in the Six Nations, pushing them all the way in Cardiff. Wales got stuck in, as they did at Loftus Versfeld, tackling hard, competing at the breakdown and keeping going.
Wales have become very good at elements of the game that require little or no skill, rather hard work and application. They produced a line-out move of note early on, quickly moving the ball to Louis Rees-Zammit, right. The Gloucester wing’s pace did the rest but he was not involved much after that: his second try followed Nick Tomkins’s opportunism after a line-out.
Wales were on a bombing raid and up went the kicks. They wilfully conceded penalties throughout, as they had done at Twickenham in February, but 18-3 ahead at halftime, they had South Africa for the taking and the back three to do it.
Instead, the ball continued to be sent high, the Springboks got their rolling maul into gear, yellow cards were brandished and Dan Biggar’s late deliberate knock-on which, strangely, did not lead to the outside-half ’s second yellow of the match, gave the home side a victory their play did not merit. A draw would have been more fitting for both sides, and that Wales failed to secure it was down to Tomos Williams kicking possession away with 30 seconds to go to give the home side a final attack and sum up his side’s aim low approach.
Three weeks before, tributes had been paid to the former Llanelli and Wales outside-half Phil Bennett, who had died at the age of 73. The player who started that Barbarians try against New Zealand in 1973 and who the following year sent dozens of defenders the wrong way as the Lions won the series in South Africa. The rugby they played in Pretoria was not a fitting way to honour his memory: Bennett would have found a way to win through keeping the ball in hand.
Bennett’s coach at Llanelli was
Carwyn James, the mastermind of the Lions’ victory in New Zealand in 1971. James was never asked to coach Wales, largely because he held contempt for the system used then of five national selectors, believing it bred compromise and undermined the coach, and he came to despair at the safety-first direction taken by the game as coaching took root throughout the world.
“My first view of a rugby ball was from my father’s shoulders,” wrote James in a book that was published shortly after his death in 1983. “I was peering over the hedge at the end of the garden to see the village team playing. It was natural to want to play like them, two friends against two on the road with a hedge as one
touchline and the school wall another. In these internationals, I learned to sidestep and to swerve because being tackled meant being hurt, something to be avoided.” He lamented the decline in making children “literate and numerate in the skills of a game. We are seeing players reacting like unthinking robots, hiding behind moves that are called before the ball emerges. Coaching a full team is less exacting and less demanding intellectually that perfecting individual skills. Practice, someone once said, makes permanent, not necessarily perfect. The main concern of the coach should be the quick transference of the ball from scrum-half to wing with each member of the chain being able to give and take in one stride.” Another coach who subscribed to that was New Zealand’s Fred Allen, a former captain of the All Blacks who took over in
1966. Like James, members of his u dain for selectors that games shoul was a time when a three points, by sc than kicking goal
He brought the Europe in 1967 an home undefeated. at every opportun stressing the thre possession and pa known for his tax sions: in one drill two lengths of the man allowed only before he passed t dropped, they sta
They were unb 1968, but Allen’s r his union wanted independence of removed from the later came the Lio Zealand team tha “We did not believ in keeping the bal have to do the sim rectly and you ha to win. If you can
pass, you are throwing the ball away to the opposition.You have to stick to the basics and believe in yourself. The British did not believe it when we said in 1967 that we were going to play winning rugby; neither did the International Rugby Board. In the end they had to admit it was great rugby and that we were among the best three sides that had ever gone to the UK.”
James would not be able to invariably step his way out of contact today but the game has reached a point where the growth in the number of breakdowns at the expense of set-pieces is taking too much of a toll. Last weekend, Johnny Sexton, Tom Curry and Tomas Francis all left the field with concussion, and not for the first time this year, although Sexton’s was downgraded to a failed head injury assessment, while Sam Whitelock was missing for the All Blacks yesterday. Attempts have been made to tempt teams into seeking space rather than contact with law changes such as the 50-22 and the goal-line drop out, but they have had a marginal effect.
Matches like the one at Pretoria last week remain the exception rather than the norm, head-on contests in which no one is prepared to take a step backwards. Wales’s response to the defeat was to drop Josh Adams from the left wing and replace him with Alex Cuthbert, a selection much like Cokanasiga’s with England, a player given to going through opponents rather than around them. An attacking selection it was not.
When will an international rugby team have a coach with the boldness of Brendon McCullum who trusts his players rather than processes? Japan went for it under Jamie Joseph in the World Cup they hosted in 2019 and more is the pity that the pandemic has prevented them from building on the advances they made that year when they defeated Ireland and Scotland in getting to the quarter-final stage for the first time.
Japan did not play for more than a year and their performances since have been underwhelming. Two victories over Uruguay last month were followed by a 42-23 defeat to France in Toyota last weekend, although the hosts were level at half-time. It was the first time the two countries had met in Japan and a changed French side coped with a temperature of 33 degrees and 55 per cent humidity.
Japan look to move the ball because they are not going to win many matches by overcoming opponents physically, yet as concussion remains prevalent despite considerable effort by World Rugby to reduce the number of incidents, something more fundamental is needed than red cards for high challenges or a line-out throw for a 50-22.
Rugby needs a McCullum, a coach who urges his players to aim high. An oft-used phrase in an era of kicking exchanges is that you have to earn the right to go wide: a team, so it goes, has to manoeuvre space before moving the ball otherwise defence will prevail.
It is a negative mantra, an acceptance that there is nothing to be gained by passing when a defence is set. The game was vastly different in the day of Bennett, but it was hardly easy for backs: the pitches were heavy and, by the middle of the season, large tracts of them were grassless; balls absorbed water and became heavy; jerseys were long-sleeved, allowing tacklers to cling on; and in terms of foul play, players got away with far more and late tackles on outside-halves largely went unpunished unless they were posthumous.
The likes of Barry John and Bennett had to live off their wits, less reliant on a playbook than their own vision.
It was a game where contact was to be avoided, at least by backs, and with most forwards in those days committing themselves to rucks, there was more space behind and more opportunities for players to run at their opposite numbers.
Players tended to be specialists then. Now they are expected to be all-rounders because the game revolves around the tackle area rather than the scrum or line-out which have become far less of a contest for possession with crooked feeds and throws connived at.
James lamented towards the end of his life that “we live in an age of mass coaching. Too much of it is directed to the group rather than the individual. Rugby coaches have forgotten the importance and the value of individual skills within the team effort. There is little difference these days, it seems to me, between a rugby coaching session in Invercargill or Inverness, in Durban or Dubai. Each has a rigid, frigid air of finality about it. Each reflects the manual more than the man.”
What would he make of it now, not least Wales’s obsession with kicking rather than running? It is one thing for England to pick Marcus Smith, but another to create the conditions in which he can flourish.
James paid tribute to Fred Allen, who was nicknamed the Needle by players because he was not afraid to call anyone out, even Colin Meads who was once pulled up for yawning while the coach was in full flow. “He was a superb motivator, perhaps the most demanding of all the coaches I have met,” said James. “He encouraged his players to think. And rugby football is a thinking game. I placed great value on individual skills and if my sessions worked (on the 1971 Lions tour) with 30 of the best players in these islands, I feel more concerned than ever that they should continue to be taught. It may well be the emphasis the game needs at the present moment the world over.”
“Players used to be specialists. Now they need to be all-rounders”