One of my proudest moments in rugby was the Wales Grand Slam of 2005. Wales had not made a clean sweep of all the other home nations for 27 years, but in 2005 they managed it in style.
They played an open brand of football that would be welcomed with open arms in today’s Super Rugby competition.
That Welsh team was one of the few in Six Nations history that embraced risk wholeheartedly – or, if you like, played their rugby in chaos rather than through structure.
Performance-wise, the climax came in the fourth round, at Murrayfield against Scotland. Wales scored six tries and made 38 offloads in the first 50 minutes on their way to a 46-22 win on a ground where they had always found life difficult.
Those 38 offloads turned out to be more, in just over one-half of a game, than Ireland made in the entire championship!
The ghost of this victory was raised by the exuberant performance of the Chiefs against the Brumbies this weekend. Not only was the score similar (48-23) and the number of tries scored by the Chiefs the same, but there was the same desire to play rugby from the background of ‘being comfortable in chaos’.
Most of the Chiefs’ structural elements, like scrum and lineout, were no more than adequate – but the further they moved away from structure, the more the difference between the two sides became apparent.
There was little hint of what was to follow in the first 27 minutes of the match. The Brumbies dominated this period, and it is interesting to dig deeper into the key events of that first quarter.
In this period of the match the Brumbies produced five breakdown steals and one spoil (including 2.5 steals and the spoil by David Pocock) – an average of one steal every five minutes. They also received six penalties (including three kickable goals) – one every four minutes. They made four clean breaks (including three from kick returns) – one every six minutes.
More than enough here to have established a healthy lead you would have thought, with the penalty count, David Pocock’s ability on the deck controlling territory, and the clean breaks giving opportunities to score.
But in fact the score was only 6-5 to the Brumbies at the end of this period, and that rapidly became 6-12 when the clearing kick after Christian Lealiifano’s final steal was returned for a score by James Lowe.
So why did the Brumbies’ domination not count for more on the scoreboard? The answer lies in the structure-chaos balance, and the two very different mind-sets involved.
The Brumbies’ four line-breaks only accrued six points via two penalties, and two turnovers by the Chiefs.
1. Fardy line-break at 4:14
Scott Fardy makes the break, but one second later the Chiefs have blanket coverage of all the support lanes, with Robbie Coleman blocked out by 14 Toni Pulu and Tomas Cubelli (out of shot) blocked out by 3 Siate Tokolahi and 10 Aaron Cruden. The passer, Lealiifano, was also knocked down immediately after making the delivery to Fardy.
2. Coleman line-break at 7:19
Robbie Coleman makes the break, but at the first ruck the Chiefs already have 13 defenders back in the line. 9 Tomas Cubelli makes the wrong decision here, taking four lateral steps to his right and engaging a forward receiver in Sam Carter. This slows the attacking process down significantly, whereas returning to the short side via a backs receiver (Lealiifano with 8 Ita Vaea in support) stood a better chance of maintaining it.
3. Tomane line-break at 19:24
Joe Tomane makes a good initial line-break and offload inside to Tomas Cubelli, but rather than giving the ball immediately at 19:26 the halfback double pumps and only passes when the last defender (Lowe) is up in his face at 19:27. Cubelli is knocked off his natural support line by the contact with Lowe, and Michael Leitch is granted another vital second to get back and tackle Lealiifano from behind.
4. Toua line-break at 21:27
Aidan Toua makes the break-out on the left, and possibly has the chance to make a pass inside to Cubelli running in support at 21:28, but one second later the opportunity has gone. Cubelli is covered by Sam Cane and the support lanes are saturated with five Chiefs defenders. When Matt Toomua takes the ball to the line at 21:47 the breakdown is under-resourced, with only Toua going in to clean out Cane – an unequal contest which Cane wins hands-down.
This pattern continued throughout the game, with the Brumbies either making errors on their kick returns (43:32 and 46:50) or being forced to settle for three points rather than five or seven after creating clean breaks (59:10 and 71:25) – or indeed nothing at all (69:00). They were 0/6 for tries on clean breaks, and they failed to convert any of their seven meaningful turnover or kick return opportunities. Their tries came exclusively from structure – from close-range scrums (35:20), or lineouts set up by scrum penalties (53:50).
When the game shifted from structure into chaos, it was the Chiefs who were in charge, as much defensively as on attack. The Brumbies, who are the best-structured team in Australia, showed some weaknesses when forced to operate in chaos after a break had been made:
• Flooding the support lanes
• Slowing the game back down into ‘structure’
• Inaccurate decisions by the ball-carrier
The Chiefs, by contrast, excelled in all of these areas. They scored four tries and 28 points from ‘chaotic’ situations (kick returns and turnovers), and arguably you could add in Aaron Cruden’s superb kick-pass to James Lowe to that list. Although technically from a first phase scrum, the kick was executed so close to the defence that it suggested a delayed decision with all the options still open
At 64:35 James Lowe is clearly signalling for the kick as he sees the Brumbies’ last defender (Aidan Toua) ‘eyes in’ on the 15-metre line. There is no way Toua can recover to mark Lowe from that position, so this was an example where the receiver triggered the play, not the kicker himself. It is probably as close as you can come to ‘chaos in action’ from a set phase.
What is especially interesting about the Chiefs’ attacks in chaos is both their efficiency, and their awareness of Pocock.
In terms of efficiency, the Chiefs only needed a total of nine phases, 25 passes and eight offloads to score their four tries at 14:45, 28:30, 39:38 and 66:50. That’s an average of two phases, six passes and two offloads per try.
There was no return to a more laborious structural attacking set-up in any of them, with the offload and close support the weapons of choice to achieve continuity once the line had been breached.
Let’s take a look at the two tries at 39:38 and 28:30 ‘live’:
After Pocock’s two-and-a-half steals (plus one spoil) in the ‘Brumbies dominant’ period, the Chiefs took great care with the accuracy of the techniques they employed against him. At 27:55 Pocock is buried at the first tackle, which effectively buys the Chiefs an easy second-phase ruck win at 28:08. When play comes back towards him at 28:13, Pocock is bypassed by good footwork and the offload by Cane as play goes to the outside.
In the later sequence, at 39:04, Pocock is first cleverly blocked out of the defensive gap underneath Lealiifano by prop Mitchell Graham to engineer the break for Charlie Ngatai, before committing to a losing ruck at 39:24.
In a second-half sequence at 66:20-66:50:
Pocock is ‘hooked’ on the far side of the first breakdown by Taleni Seu (66:29), which leaves him out of position in the drift defence at 66:38. He never quite recovers into a position where he can defend the Chiefs’ support runners, and at 66:47 Brad Weber has run past him to collect the final pass and score the try.
The Chiefs’ activity in the support lanes is also superior to that of the Brumbies. At 28:24 there are options (inside and out) for James Lowe after the initial breach is made, and those options are still there when he gets the ball back from Cruden three seconds later. In the second sequence there are three Chiefs ahead of the Brumbies’ scramble defence at 39:10, when Ngatai goes to pass, and despite running out of room near touch, Lowe still has two supports available for the next offload at 39:14.
Likewise, Damian McKenzie is nearest to James Lowe at 66:44 and Weber has run past Pocock to get prime position for the scoring pass at 66:47.
The problem for teams attuned to structure is that they often struggle to ‘breathe’ in the extended finishing scenarios which demand skills in chaos. They achieve dominance but they don’t score as many points as they could in the process. They are often forced to accept three points (or nothing at all) in situations where they should be looking for seven. At other times they have to wait for structured positions, scrums or lineouts close to the opposition goal-line, in order to score.
As long as they can create enough turnovers or positive kick-return positions, chaotic teams have no such hang-ups. Their scoring potential will always be optimised, and from anywhere on the field, when opposition dominance begins to flag.
Their main concern is that their structures (lineout and scrum) hold up, and in this case the Brumbies all-game scrum superiority and first half-hour breakdown clout was nowhere near enough to stop the Chiefs’ virtues from flooding over Canberra at the end of a heady night.
