[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]P[/su_dropcap]redictability is something of a dirty word in rugby union. How many times have you heard sub-par attack being derided for being “predictable” during a game? Countless times, I’m sure. But predictability isn’t always a bad thing, at least when it comes to the general picture you present to the opposition.

In MMA or Muai Thai kickboxing, fighters often invest a lot of time in generating “tells” to telegraph certain strikes to their opponent before changing the strike to hurt a more critical part of the body. A typical example would be a fighter shifting his feet in a certain pattern before attempting a kick to the body. The opponent will eventually associate the shifting of the feet with a strike to the body and move his arms from his head to protect his body; this leaves your opponent open for an unprotected high kick to the head that could knock them out and end the fight.

In this situation, one fighter has used their body to tell a lie to the opponent. In rugby, you can do the same. In this article, I’ll show you how the Waratahs attempted to use this kind of action against the Queensland Reds – they weren’t quite successful, but it’s still an interesting look at how the concept works.

Maul Feint Swivel

The Waratahs – and Australia – often use Michael Hooper as a receiver on their lineout schemes. Hooper isn’t a natural lineout jumper so it makes sense to use him as an early maul component from this position.

In practice, this allows Hooper to step in from the receiver position to directly take the ball from the jumper as the maul forms around him. He can then take the ball to the back of the maul to lock & bind or bounce back to the tail of the maul for a feint breakaway.

This was the critical picture at the back of the maul from a Reds perspective.

As Hooper breaks away from the maul feint, he’s got three options. He can break himself and go for the try line, he can break and pass to #9 Mitch Short or he can swivel the ball to the hooker, Robbie Abel, as he runs a tight arc infield.

These are first set of options for the Reds to think about.

In this instance, Hooper swivelled the ball to Abel, who took the ball infield on an arcing run that has three branching options.

First, watch the Reds flanker Fraiser McReight completely buy the dummy run of the Waratahs scrumhalf and, as a result, complete the isolation on the defending flyhalf.

Once Abel reaches the peak of his run, he’s joined by a late-arriving run by #14 James Ramm on his inside shoulder and an angled run by #12 Joey Walton on his outside shoulder.

With McReight taken away from the space by the dummy run of Blue #9, the isolation on O’Connor is complete.

The three radiating options are (a) Abel carries the ball through the gap (b) he passes – or offloads – to his inside shoulder option or (c) he passes to the outside shoulder option.

In this instance, Abel probably takes too much from the run and overloads his own decision making. I think the killer pass is the inside ball in this instance but everything up until that point worked really smoothly.

Thirty minutes later, while the Waratahs were down a man in the pack due to a sin bin, they won a lineout in a similar position and lined up in exactly the same way.

Hooper was approaching the lineout as a receiver. The #9 was lurking in the exact same position as he did on the last lineout with #14 taking up an almost identical deep-lying position.

The maul feint they build is even targeted to the same position (yellow zone) and when you watch how this scheme progresses, you’ll see the pattern they were looking to build into the Reds’ defensive processes.

Let’s watch the changes in the Reds’ behaviour when they see the same lineout scheme;

(1) The tail gunner does not commit to the maul as he recognises Abel’s run (and the deep-lying assets that were present on the previous scheme) and wants to step out of the line to make the tackle.

(2) The Reds #8 Harry Wilson is guarding the 5m channel as the designated cover player (Law 18.15) as he does on any Reds lineout in their own 22. This leaves McReight as an inside shoulder backup to O’Connor off the lineout. His typical route from that position is to close in on the lineout or maul to either back up the maul or, in this instance, closeout a tramline play.

I think this play was slightly undone by the sloppy ball transfer at the back of the maul. The jumper held onto the ball a little too long in steadying himself, and that rocked the handoff to Hooper, who had to juggle the ball for half a second to get it under control.

That prevented Hooper from getting the clean break he needed to put #9 one on one with the blindside winger at pace. He still got the pass away but I would argue that he wanted the collision point to be more advanced to create a superior isolation for Short down the tramline.

Cut to early in the second half and the Waratahs have another lineout position inside the Reds’ 22. In the walk-up, the Reds will have seen a few familiar shapes aligning behind the lineout.

Hooper + deep scrumhalf + deep-lying winger?

It’s the exact same layout as the previous two lineouts.

The Waratahs have shown the Reds two options off this lineout – an arc infield and a cut towards the touchline – so as the Waratahs walk-up to this lineout, the Reds have to consider both options as live possibilities because they’ve already defended them.

The Reds have compressed their backfield options but made an important change – they’ve moved O’Connor into a backfield position and his place as the first back defender next to McReight has been taken by blindside winger Filipo Daugunu.

The key man here is McReight. On the first lineout, he got badly sold by Short’s decoy run infield and it’s unlikely he’ll buy another route by Short so fully.

On the touchline side, the Reds can’t afford to concede a linebreak from this range down the tramlines the initial touchline maul defence will be affected. We should expect the forwards closest to the touchline to stay out of the initial maul to guard against this potential tramline break because there is no winger guarding the space behind Wilson.

Let’s turn back to McReight and what the Waratahs can now expect from him, from a defensive behaviour perspective. I’d expect him to go hard in the other direction – directly onto the channel – in such a way that it could be exploited.

Have a look at how it played out;

Tupou and Wilson stayed out of the maul to guard the touchline, Hooper feints well and hands the ball off to Abel coming on the same arc route. He pumps right to Mark Nawaqanitawase before eventually dumping off the ball to Walton, who was running the same hard inside line as he was on the previous two lineouts.

This move doesn’t work out for the Waratahs but I think that comes down to the decision taken by Abel right before contact. Abel did manage to commit McReight to a “sit down” on his right foot and I think a pass inside to Nawaqanitawase was the winning pass here, once again.

On a critical note, I think Nawaqanitawase’s line needed to be timed a little better on this play to make him a cleaner option for Abel and I wasn’t a fan of Short’s starting position on this play.

For me, I think he has more of a gravitational pull on McReight if he starts his run from a position on Hooper’s left shoulder. A wider swinging arc that targeted Wilson’s outside shoulder (yellow route) rather than the blue route he actually ran might have pull McReight off line in a way that Abel might have used better.

The concept behind this is still really strong though. By showing the Reds three different variations of the exact same lineout build – maul feint with the exact same three runs from the hooker, scrumhalf and deep winger – allowed the Waratahs to read their response and pick an option that would have ideally lead to a clean linebreak or a try.