I'll have to check more about the Irish obstruction, but just looking at their first try last night you can see the Scotty 2 being taken out by the Irish 4 with the blue cap - obviously deliberate as he just keeps going into him when there was no reason to. Ringrose then runs into a gap on the inside of the Scottish 5 where the Scottish 2 could have covered had he not been taken out.
Yep Ireland are cheating and the erfs are in on it as we saw when Ireland played the Boks.
NZ will sort them out. The Scots beat them up front as territory and possession stats showed. Ireland manage to win because of Smart attacking ploys that at times involve obstruction. As Corny King says that slow down the ball very well.
Against the Boks they got well beaten in the second half and only the ref and our bad goal kicking saved them.
A big mouth commentator was over the moon by the Irish win. He reckoned the Abs should be very worried. The big mouth needs taking down a peg or two. Go wee abs. You seem to have a better pack operating now so you should be able to do it.
Ireland is very good. I still fancy them to beat the All Blacks. They cruised past a very decent Scotland side, scored almost with the ease we scored against Romania in that first half.
Scotlands defence wasn't remotely as smart as ours. The wee Abs will be better both on defence and attack. They can win against Ireland. And so can the Boks
Korn, no matter which system one employs to evaluate or rate players, the players he uses the most are the least useful, least productive, and least effective. There is no escaping this fact. I wish I could sit Erasmus down and go through a test frame by frame and force him to explain himself. He wouldn't be able to defend himself. He is useless. Erasmus is the dumbest coach I have ever seen. Clive Woodward and Wayne Smith were right, we have a bizarre setup that is holding the Boks back.
To me it's a case of having to look the part.
SA rugby is in the mindset of if you don't look the part then it's impossible for you to be the part.
One honestly needs look no further than Kriel. Guy looks like a good 13 should. And he has the physical attributes. Hence he gets many many caps. At no point does anyone actually study his play and accurately asses whether he's adding value. He's had a long career, and has added so little. DDA the same. They killed the backs so badly that we lost to fking Japan. JAPAN! But they look the part, so it can't be their fault, right?
But it's not just the coaches, it's the fans too. Kriel gets passed an open field ball by PSDT against Wales, scores a try from it, and suddenly "he's back in form". For the love of God...WHAT FORM!!!???
That's one side of it.
The other side is that we lack so much nuance in our assessments. "Forward must go smash. Forward must go forward. Forward must go bang. No big bang, no deserving to be Bokke's forward".
We expect all our loosies and both locks must smash the line, always make ground in traffic and always tackle opposition backwards...else they are useless. Because there is nothing else to playing up front.
"Boo boo! Plum is so negative."
Of course I'm negative. Boks fans and Bok coaches keep squandering masses of talent. We're better at pissing on talent than we are at rugby. We have so many great forwards that we could pick three world class packs. We have highly talented backs coming out of our ears too. And this isn't a new thing. It's been going on for ages.
No? Okay...why on God's green earth is Werner Kok not in the Bok squad? Because he doesn't look the part. Jessie looks the part. Doesn't matter that Kok is about a million times smarter and more influential than Jessie. Werner doesn't look the part.
There's this kind of arrogance we have which can be summed up to something like "We big, meaning we are smart too."
We're not smart. We're a million miles away from being smart. We have about 2 good coaches in this entire country.
The proof that we are not smart lay in two facts. 1) Only NZ match us for talent and grass roots rugby interest and 2) our win percentage doesn't come close to New Zealand's.
Saffa rugby can be summed up in one simple logical fallacy...The appeal to tradition.
There are so many excuses and fallacies that we employ to arrive at our answers that, to my mind, it's only raw talent that has even kept us in the running.
I remember the example from some yeas back...again referring to the Lions. They were beating Los Jags(Basically Los Pumas) by 50 points on a canter. The same season the Boks could barely scrape past Argentina.
Then to justify sticking with our backwards mindset, we blamed the gulf in performance against Argentina between the Lions and Boks on the fact that "when they put the Los Pumas jersey on they are so much better."
This is the absolute shit we convince ourselves of so that we can stick to the traditional fallacy. We're petrified of stepping out of tradition.
We do that because we aren't smart. We do that because we are afraid. We do that because we do not know how to make the best use our our talent.
Enjoy the French game boys.
I'll be cheering for Ireland after the French kick us out.
Yes, the Ireland that were done with their experimenting before the World Cup and picked their best side to play pool games. The Ireland that is playing the best rugby anyone here has seen in a decade. The Ireland that has far less raw talent than we do but are willing to trust and evolve that talent into a side that is greater than the sum of their parts. They don't care about tradition. They care about being the best side they can be....BECAUSE THEY ARE BRAVE, BECAUSE THEY ARE SMART!
How great would it be, just for five years, to be able to say that about the Boks???????
Excellent post Plum. Those sentiments explain why I hated the 2020 chicken run… the complacency when NZ wins the RC year after year….the lack of ambition in our backline play. We are happy with the occasional success, usually in the WC where teams tend to come down to our level of safety first rugby.
The Ireland style of back play is so much more complex than our’s ….double wings, dummy runners, always a wide option for the kick pass. More like the brilliant Aussie backline with Larkham, Horan and Herbert.
Yesterday it was sometimes confusing as to where the ball actually was. Brilliant stuff. But we are unwilling to appoint a state of the art backline coach.
And the excuse mongering….the ref cheated us. According to some on the Board we never should have lost to France and to Ireland twice in the last 6 months. Trouble is when you reduce every game to a stalemate you are going to lose a lot of games by a few points.
Bok fans should demand more….but they just don’t. When some are dissatisfied there is immediately a chorus of disapproval, accusations of disloyalty. But fans should be loyal to what the Boks could be, the clear best team in the world playing complete rugby, not a one dimensional team that struggles over a low bar.
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So just came across this clip of Nick Mallet being interviewed. In this interview he talks about something called Battle Stats.
So apparently Rassie and Co have battle stats about every player in the world and they rank the players accordingly.
If you want to watch interview, go here. Not the best quality
Nick Mallet Interview
So what I could summarise. The give players positive and negative stats. Positive stats is if when a player is involved with play over the ball. So making a tackle and getting onto your feet quickly counts as 2 points. If you pass the ball, counts as one etc.
Then, they also look at players that are the most involved in the game and has a positive contribution in the shortest amount of times.
So it is if a player makes a tackle and then maybe make another or gets involved in a ruck.
According to Nick, the highest ranking player is kwagga, he is involved almost every minute with positive contributions.
I ask you then, why is he not starting ahead of that lazy bastard Kolisi, he is not even mentioned.
It also explains why a pap Mostert is ranked higher and starts more often. Even though he doesn't dominate tackles or give us front foot ball, neither does he break tackles or draw defenders in like Eben does.
If these stats were so important, why can't we string more than 5 wins together and always lose against weaker teams when we shouldn't. Wales and Australia ring a bel?
So apparently Dud ranks high because he makes "positive" contributions.
Another hyper bowl of bull shit if you ask me. Not very smart rugby.
Just watch the Irish last night, how the stifled Scotlands attack by not committing to many if any players to the ruck. What was really interesting is their tackle technique and how the tackler slows the ball down legally. Every time the tackler got back up, he pushed over the ball. Didn't try to pilfer the ball, just enough to slow the ball down and draw in more Scottish players to clear him out. How would that ranked according to these so called "battle" stats.
It was a masterclass by Ireland. Still don't like the fact that they get away with obstructive play. But world rugby will let it go because it makes the game look sexy.
In there lies the key as well if you want to beat Ireland. You don't want to play loose against them. You just want to keep hammering them up front. If we picked a proper bomb squad and a decent kicker then we would not have had this problem. The bulls showed the way and so did La Rochelle of how to beat Irish teams.
Well, going to be interesting quarters. I really want the Irish to lose.