The Guru ponders S14 Week 3

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 15:57

Binding in the front row

This is a lovely time of year in the Southern Hemisphere when we begin to prepare for our local club season, school boys and their coaches sniff winter in the air and we all have the opportunity to watch the Super 14 matches as well as the Six Nations tussles, storing what we see and learn (if we are brave enough to learn) from these top-class games, good and bad.

For me the bad is the stereotyped, the obvious, the predictable; it is the counting of phases and extolling the virtue of them; it is going to ground and slowing the game down; it is flat alignment and smashing headfirst into defence without the thought of a pass or a deviation in the running line; it is mindlessly “taking the ball up”; it is believing all the rugby aphorisms that have become clichés. It is the opposite of all this that is the good. The game is the better for having a great variety of styles, tactics, approaches; it stagnates when we all emulate one another, when the obvious becomes the norm, even if, once, the obvious was original and refreshingly, successfully revolutionary. My kingdom for an original thinker!

There is great joy in seeing pure heart on the field: Ireland’s second half against France, Italy’s performances against England and France, Scotland, the underdogs, versus predictable England, young Sharks zestful away fixture with Crusaders, Western Force in David-like (although they lost) performances against Brumbies, Hurricanes and Chiefs and always, whenever they play, the Cheetahs. Somehow there is a joy in their play that makes the patterned, conventional, stereotypical Englands, Stormers, Blue Bulls seem soullessly boring and so utterly without light, cheer or bubble. “How dull it is to rust unburnish’d, not shine in use…” I am not suggesting the players of these sides are unused but I am suggesting that they do not shine in use!). It is surprising, for example, that a team such as the Stormers, with all that apparent backline talent, cannot score tries. Why? Approach perhaps?

This brings up the subject of drilling and drills in coaching the game. It is interesting to see that Alan Hutchinson in his excellent CD entitled Grassroots Rugby comes out strongly against drills. There is quite a well-known coach in my part of the world who cannot talk kindly about running the ball in rugby; whenever he mentions the subject he has to say “…running the ball at all costs.” He cannot for the life of him leave out the “at all costs”. I am a bit the same about drills; I cannot talk about drilling players without adding the word: “mindlessly”. By drilling, we get players into habits, most of them undoubtedly good habits, but the very word ‘habit’ suggests there is no thought going into whatever is being practised; equally when the habit is used in a game situation, it is used without thought- the player automatically moves into habit mode and all originality is lost in favour of habit and predictability.

It was a member of the Brumbies management, the coach, perhaps, who the other day in a T.V. rugby programme, in talking about how the Brumbies practise and play, said something like, “We spend hours practising unstructured rugby.” What and extraordinary, paradoxical thing to say! Paradoxical because upon examination, how sensible. The trouble with much of the game today is that it is drilled into players and the changes in the laws have made that easy. There are too few free thinkers on the field and those that there are, are either considered too dangerous to field (some of them end up on the bench, especially in South Africa) or they are hailed as geniuses. Were players not drilled, we should have many more geniuses playing the game!

There is a big difference between coaching and drilling; coaching encourages thought, drilling does the opposite. The other problem with drills is that as a coach you sometimes do not take the time to examine the technique of the player carefully whilst he performs the drill; result is he will drill well but on the match field faults in technique will show up. It is tempting to use nothing other than drills at practice  because it is so easy and, in fact, quite enjoyable for players and coach especially if you vary your drills. They are not absolutely useless, either; the suggestion is that you use them very carefully, never neglecting individual coaching of skills, always explaining the whys and wherefores and putting everything into context.

Interesting that in an excellent coaching session on lineouts given by one of the Waratah’s coaches, he revealed that in early season, they spent hours practising lineouts without the ball- makes sense if you consider all the organisation that must go into the lineout variations and how much practising of lifting you must do. Apparently the hooker and the players read the lineout, theirs and the opponents’ and so no calls are used. I was not close enough to their match to ascertain the truth of that statement but, again, it makes sense.

Finally, I fielded a query from a reader of this web site concerning the front row’s; he  had noticed on television while watching the Super 14, how loosely hookers bound with their props compared with the way they used to bind so tightly when he was playing hooker. I watched closely this past weekend and I tend to agree, though I thought the 6 Nations hookers bound more tightly, more as in previous days.

Certainly, hookers nowadays scrum as props do; they come in square, shoulders straight with those of the props; they do not twist as they used to do, mainly because striking for the ball is not what it used to be because of the way the ball is put in. Then, too, if you do twist towards your ball, you are opening up your chest as you strike and in the nasty days of yore (and even now?) that was when tight head props and even opposing hookers used to come into your ribs with evil intent. Refs are paranoid at present about scrumming straight and they even blow hookers for popping out of scrums (sometimes when they have been popped out by the opponents, I believe!). I do think that if the props bind tightly on the hooker, there is not the need for the hooker to bind as tightly- again, in the old days, the hooker would extend his right arm bind; he would bind on the tight head prop’s middle back, thus enabling him the lower his right shoulder on his own ball, wedging it between the opposing hooker and his tight head prop, pushing the opponent away from the ball. What a science!

I think the Argentinians bind as tightly as ever. Do you think that this loose bind is the reason so many hookers are “popped” in the modern game and are they loose in order to get quickly away from the scrum on its dispersal?