The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Don’t overreact about Huw
The sound of knees jerking almost drowned out the rather subdued crowd at the Principality Stadium last weekend ... and they were from the few Scots who made the Autumn trip to Cardiff.
Huw Jones, a conspicuous success by any measurement with 10 tries in just 16 starts for Scotland, now “can’t be trusted” because he was “exposed” in missing two tackles in the game against Wales.
Now there was no question that Jones failed to get to grips with George North in the first half and Jonathan Davies in the second, and tries resulted soon after. It’s fairly easy, as some of his team-mates have pointed out, to load up on the missed tackles as the sole reason for the tries being scored.
In addition, Jones appears to be now being retrospectively blamed for the rout at Twickenham 20 months ago, when Jonathan Joseph cut the Scots defence to pieces.
As much as we like to believe that today’s rugby defences are super-solid that one-on-one tackles are never missed, or never should be, the reality is somewhat different.
In Saturday’s game, Wales missed 16 tackles and Scotland 11. The conversion rates of 91% (for Wales) and 88% were pretty standard figures for Test rugby.
The worst offender in the game was actually Wales’ Hadley Parkes, with four missed tackles.
He’s often regarded as a particularly good defensive centre, but his tackle conversion percentage in 2018 is actually nowhere near the world leader at outside centre in international rugby this year who is ... Huw Jones, with a rate of 85%.
Is Jones a liability? His record would certainly suggest not. And in addition, he is also one of the most effective attacking 13s in international rugby at present.
These are just bare stats, obviously, and we can make manipulate them to fit to anything we like. But a closer look at Saturday shows that if Jones was exposed, it was by the system Scotland have in place to defend certain situations rather than his own lack of defensive ability.
Both tries came off early phase ball, which probably made the scores even more galling for Scottish defence coach Matt Taylor.
In the first, Wales executed a neat screen move to bring North, their premier strike runner, into the line on the opposite wing side.
They succeeded in getting outside Jones and he missed the side-on tackle, no question. But the Scottish system did not provide sufficient insurance to cover a line break – North is a reasonably decent player and you’d expect him to break a tackle now and again.
Blair Kinghorn was on his heels and unable to cover properly. Alex Dunbar was unable to sweep from the other side and also got his hands on North but failed to hold on (although nobody seems to have remembered that).
The point? Scotland’s defensive system should be able to cope in that situation with one missed tackle, maybe even two, because they happen with a fair regularity.
This was illustrated even more starkly at the second try by Davies.
In real time (and the Principality Stadium press box is in a lousy position to see) I was flabbergasted that Wales went through apparently so effortlessly off first phase ball.
Replays illustrated it clearly. There was no defensive cover to assist Jones as Gareth Ainscombe ran a sweep route to the line, getting outside Dunbar.
“The world leader at outside centre in 2018 with a tackle conversion rate of 85% is ... Huw Jones
From the moment the Welsh 10 got outside the Scottish inside centre, Jones was in trouble even if he had made the tackle, as he effectively had two men running at him unchecked.
It still wouldn’t necessarily be so bad as Huw could reasonably expect cover from Adam Hastings or even the left wing (Lee Jones in this case) sweeping in behind.
No such cover materialised, and allied to Davies’ strong hand-off (again, this is a pretty decent player we’re talking about) it meant that once Jones was caught side-on that there was a bewildering amount of open country in behind him.
No-one laid a finger on the Lions centre as he galloped the rest of the way.
Enough of this technique and strategy, though. The bottom line is that in two years Jones has quickly become keystone of the Scottish team as an attacker.
Is he, even yet, the finished article? No, but a centre with the ability to score tries like his second in the Calcutta Cup game in February and with a rate better than one every two games for Scotland is pure gold.
He’s actually a pretty decent defender and throwing the baby out with the bathwater on one, pretty superfluous game – effectively a World Cup warm-up game with virtually nothing at stake – is an absurd overreaction.
In any case, Scotland’s depth chart at centre, pretty decent a few months ago, is worryingly thin at present with Matt Scott, Duncan Taylor and Mark Bennett presently unavailable.
We don’t really have a choice, unless you think it might be Nick Grigg.
Any issues there are with Jones or the system arising from Saturday are easily solved anyway.