[su_dropcap style=”flat”]I[/su_dropcap] have a complex relationship with Japan. It’s a bit like Bill Murray in Lost In Translation except my reason isn’t a sense of cultural displacement set against a backdrop of a mid-life crisis. No, mine is more mundane although whether or not it’s set to the backdrop of a mid-life crisis remains to be seen.
My problem with Japan is that the Japanese rugby team have become a panacea, of sorts, to a large subset of the rugby public who resent the games as they currently see it – one that values size and power above all – and who see Japan as a rejection of those qualities. To them, the swashbuckling Japanese side of the 2019 World Cup are a symbol of a different way; a game that values speed, skill, offloading and, best of all, it can seemingly hang with the bigger teams.
In a lot of ways, Japan have become the “but what about” team whenever you speak about the power differential in the modern game and how problematic it can be. When you talk about losing offensive and defensive collisions and how it cost you the game, the answer has become an instinctive “but what about Japan?”.
This is a particularly common refrain in Irish rugby because we suffered a, frankly, humiliating defeat to Japan in the 2019 World Cup. Japan, playing high-tempo, high-skill offloading rugby comfortably beat an Irish side that had developed a reputation for boring, box kick rugby on the biggest stage in the game. I watched this game back a few days ago and man, we looked bloody awful in that game. We thoroughly deserved to lose it especially after taking an early lead and then spaffing it away over the next two quarters.
That loss, and the performance that went with it, was the nadir of a slide in performance that started in the first game of the 2019 Six Nations. I don’t think we ever truly recovered from it. Not just the loss, but the shock in confidence that what we were doing structurally was effective or even logical in the game as it stood then. We qualified for the quarter-finals ahead of Scotland in second place, yes, but we took a pumping off the All Blacks and that was that. The Japan game kicked the heart of this Irish side and every game after that.
I, as someone who predicted an Irish win over Japan, was left with egg on my face. Re-reading my Green Eye for that game, I got that Japan were good, I identified that they played a 1-3-2-2 structure but I just didn’t feel that they were on Ireland’s level, quite frankly. Ultimately, regardless of how I felt Ireland were playing, I thought that we would have too much for Japan, who played some nice stuff but who didn’t have the power to handle what Ireland brought.
Boy, I was wrong. They didn’t have the power to trouble Ireland conventionally, yes, but they had a game that could and did hurt us repeatedly. When you throw in some killer penalty concessions – a fair number of them confirmed to be incorrect to the point that the referee was demoted soon after the game – and some desperately poor offensive work outside of the first 20 minutes, it’s nearly a surprise that Japan didn’t win by more. But I was wrong about them. Does that colour my lack of love for Japan’s style? Yeah, it does, for sure. I also resent the idea that anyone can play like Japan and then go on to actually win trophies consistently because it just doesn’t work. Even the comparison to Harlequins doesn’t work because they have top-end size and power in their pack and midfield.
Japan are not a team that have a style that defies the laws of physics of this game. Japan were put away fairly handily by South Africa in the quarter-final, where they couldn’t handle a team playing as much kick pressure/maul pressure as Ireland were, if not more so. A disjointed Lions side put them away in a relatively dominant fashion last weekend even while coughing up the majority of the second-half possession and territory. There is no magic spell in this game.
If Ireland want to beat Japan this Saturday they will have to ensure that they impose the physics of the game on them relentlessly in a way we could not do in 2019.
Here’s the team selected to do so.
Japan: 15. Kotaro Matsushima, 14. Semisi Masirewa, 13. Timothy Lafaele, 12. Ryoto Nakamura, 11. Siosaia Fifita, 10. Yu Tamura, 9. Naoto Saito; 1. Keita Inagaki, 2. Atsushi Sakate, 3. Koo Ji-won, 4. Wimpie van der Walt, 5. James Moore, 6. Michael Leitch (c), 7. Lappies Labuschagné, 8. Kazuki Himeno
Replacements: 16. Kosuke Horikoshi, 17. Craig Millar, 18. Asaeli Ai Valu, 19. Jack Cornelsen, 20. Tevita Tatafu, 21. Kaito Shigeno, 22. Rikiya Matsuda, 23. Shane Gates
You don’t have to look too hard at that team to realise that this is a game Andy Farrell wants a big W in.
Sure, they want a win every game but Ireland owe Japan one in a way that I tried to articulate in the preamble. Why else would James Ryan, listed as an injury risk earlier in the week, be risked at all in this game? Because we know a loss is very possible so we need our best, most experienced players.
Ireland would expect to beat the USA regardless of what combination we field in the second game but Japan are dangerous to the point that they have rightly earned the caution Andy Farrell has shown in this starting XV.
My last Green Eye for Ireland and Japan focused a little bit too much on their lineout. That said, I do feel Ireland have the size and explosivity in the counter-jump to trouble the Japanese set piece if we choose to use our resources that way. That said, I do feel Japan are aware that they don’t carry elite size in the lineout and they regularly scheme around that.
This, for example, is a deliberate scheme that launches a full jump pod in the knowledge that it isn’t the target.
It draws in the tail pod and tail gunner, however, and opens up the lane for Matsushima to attack into space. Japan use this gimmick quite a bit to open up space for their runners to the point where it is the defining trait of their overall attacking scheme.
Japan’s attack works by subterfuge. They expect that the opposition expects to have a dominant physical advantage, for the most part, so they work the ball off #9 with that as the basis for their overall scheme. Japan want teams to shoot out and over chase off #9, they want teams to look to batter their runners and then swamp the ruck. That’s how you play big against Japan which, if they didn’t move the ball as much from the pod of three, would mean a lot of lost collisions.
Their offensive scheme is built to take this into account. Japan tip on and pass into the second layer off the initial pod of three with real frequency. So if your initial forward line compresses too much on one player, you give up spacing that Japan are expert at exploiting in the middle space between the last edge defender and the C defender.
If you want to hurt Japan on D, for me, you’ve got to drift a little on their phase play. Don’t double up on their narrow runners – back yourself to win the collision and then have an inside defender assist if needed and slow down their recycle, ideally.
We want Japan to take numbers out of their attacking line to protect their rucks but, at the same time, we don’t want to get lost poaching lost causes either. The more numbers Japan have, the more passing options and shapes they can run.
The key defensive man is that player outside the C defender. He will have to track the screened Japanese runner off #9 while also covering the pass across to the second pod of two with the C defender remaining mobile to push out and offer inside support as they progress through their shape.
Ireland don’t want to overdo it on synced two-man hits off nine – we want one man to stop and slow ideally, with an inside defender assisting if necessary while the rest of the line flow out.
We want to ensure that we keep that two-man contact point so that our line can remain active to push up and out on their Japanese shape.
We’ll also need our wings to keep a really strong edge. Where I think pushing out and up is a good recipe for the inside defence, I think the edge defenders will have to be really aggressive on the Japanese wide play. If we accept that Japan want to deceive in the middle to produce opportunities out wide, I think a middle that is pushing out in support of a wide defensive unit that is really pushing up hard will close up a lot of the space that Japan want to attack.
If we can stop them offensively, it’ll come down to our own work ball in hand and off the maul in particular.
