The Springboks didn’t need to tear up their game plan to get this win. They just needed to do what they always do, just better than they did in the first test. That win in the first test, as good as it was for the Lions, masked a key element of this series that has flown under the radar somewhat given everything that happened in the media before the first test and the cringeapalooza that took place before the second test.
What are the Lions attacking concepts?
I wrote and spoke at length before the tests and even before the tour about what kind of shape we expected from the Lions but none of that has panned out in the tests. The Lions victory in the first test was built on effective box kicking, chasing, receipt pressure and earning kickable penalties in the phases after those won positions.
But effective phase play or even three/four strike play structure? It hasn’t played a massive factor in the tests so far. Why? The environment is completely different from the warm-ups, where the Lions regularly won all the collisions they wanted on the way to multi-try 40+ point wins.
In the first test, the Lions carried the ball 85 times and passed the ball 28 times between their starting and finishing pack. In the second test, the Lions carried the ball 85 times – again – but only passed the ball 16 times between their starting and finishing pack. If it felt like the Lions were playing their possessions in a phone box, it’s because they were, metaphorically speaking.
Against the Sharks, the Lions carried the ball 233 times across both tests with their forwards passing 42 times and 46 times respectively. Ah, the good old days.
Basically, everyone has a plan until the Springboks punch them in the mouth.
It’s not that the Lions didn’t have opportunities to fire a few shots back either, but time and time again they were hurt by poor on-ball choices in an environment where any kind of effective collision win was hard to come by.
Look at this dagger concept off a four-man lineout that was designed to open up, amongst other things, an isolation kick target between Itoje and de Klerk on the same side as the original lineout. Every pull point we see here is designed to draw the Springbok “fold” to the wider collision point before exploiting Faf de Klerk’s reset position post-set-piece.
It doesn’t work because Dan Biggar doesn’t have enough space to “play into” as he kicks. Without the collision point win on the “strike” of the strike play, Biggar is always in range of Mostert’s pressure so he ends up clipping it short by angling it “up” and over the charge down.
The scheme works off the concept of a stacked “trio” of runners. That narrow stack will automatically force a wide defence compression because it’s got radiating options.
In this position, the handler needs to have the ability to find the short, midrange and long options at this key junction of the play. The dagger concept can convert compressions into edge spacing but you have to find that pass.
In this space, Biggar hitting Watson at the “hilt” of the dagger is the deepest option from the gain line but Curry and Conan’s natural running lines after the pass give him a bit of protection from the defensive progression of De Allende, Pollard and Kolisi with options outside him.
Instead, Biggar hits Conan but when he goes for this option he needs a collision win to keep the Springboks off him while keeping Itoje onside. He doesn’t necessarily need multiple Springboks committed to the collision point, but he needs a dominant strike to give him time to angle his kick. Collision wins win space and earn time.
De Allende stops Conan with a solo tackle and brings him to ground way too easily.
As a result, Biggar has half a second less to work with and has to go higher angle on his kick, which turns the ball to Itoje into a slow catch.
No collision win, no space, no time, harder opportunities with smaller windows. Dan Biggar only made three passes in the entire game in part because of this Springbok collision dominance. All throughout the contest, the Lions were losing key set-up collisions that could lead to more advanced plays.
With average collisions, the ball is slow. When the ball is slow, the time outside is reduced so you need a bigger carry to speed up the play. When you don’t get that, the sequence is over and you need to reset with a kick.
When you are getting smashed off #9, you have to find easier collisions elsewhere. Without a second playmaker – Hogg did not play this role – the Lions had to go looking for inter-pod action in the hardest place to play in the game; hitting off #9 against the Springboks.
Jones was looking for a tip on here – to draw the hit and then offload to Lawes into the space – but the shot from Wiese was too strong.
That’s a shot that burns you and it’s a killer for a system that really wants to build in pass action between the forwards off #9 as a tactic to win collisions.
Even when the Lions managed to get separation from the Springbok blitz they were unable to make their layered attack work. They tried another “dagger” in the first clip here but Farrell couldn’t find the pass.
The second clip is an illustration of what happens when you lose big collisions – they cost you momentum and, against the Springbok defence, you have to reset with a kick early to prevent yourself from getting wiped out in contact over and over again.
In the face of this punishment I can’t work out why the Lions haven’t made an effort to use double playmakers or at least deploy Hogg more regularly as a second receiver outside Biggar – they used Henshaw in this slot for little tangible gain.
It also has to be said that the Lion use of the wider dagger shape seems unsuited to Biggar and Farrell’s strengths as #10s. They are excellent tacticians and balanced playmakers but the passing accuracy and range required to make the shapes we saw here seem way more suited to… Finn Russell, now that I think of it.
Whatever happens, the Lions have to play with more width and depth in the third test. There’s nothing on the gainline for them. That means playing more screen ball and using a central playmaker away from the Springbok blitz. The Lions have tried running with flat, hard runners off Biggar as the solo playmaker but all it does is increase the impact on their primary carriers and stress the pass of the playmaker who have tiny windows to play into.
Will they make the changes required? Unlike the Springboks, they have no base game to double down on because when they doubled down on their kicking game here, it wasn’t half as effective because the variable of how the Boks would respond to the aerial bombardment changed from poor to par for them.
Do the Lions stick with what we saw here and hope the Boks regress next week? For their sake, I hope not.
Notable Players
The back three had a bit of a nightmare, collectively speaking, under the high ball. There’s no getting away from it – the Lions inability to deal with the aerial bombardment that comes with the Springboks approach.
The Lions’ escorts were pretty good, for the most part, but time and again, the Springboks found access to good positions at the expense of the Lions backfield.
I thought that Robbie Henshaw and Chris Harris had little impact on the contest. Harris spent the majority of the game chasing kicks, which you’d expect given that the Lions kicked 23 times and the Springboks kicked 32 times. Henshaw was a hair away from scoring a try off a Murray chip through from close range but he couldn’t quite finish the opportunity. The rest of his game was spent in positions where I think he’s not elite – two or three times I saw him sliding into that second playmaker spot and forced into a passing situation that doesn’t suit his core skills. You want Henshaw hitting space himself at the end of a quality mid-range pass, not trying to pass to guys in space himself.
Dan Biggar and Conor Murray came in for the flak that normally comes at halfbacks when their pack lose a tonne of collisions. When you don’t have real collision dominance, your halfbacks will end up kicking a fair bit – that’s just how it works. Both Biggar and Murray kicked quite well. Murray retained 33% of his 9 box kicks, while Biggar retained 42% of his seven kicks, which had good variety all the way through.
That isn’t to say that either player was faultless. Biggar struggled to impact as a playmaker and seemed to get choked up by the Springboks line speed quite a bit more than last week. Murray, too, left one or two transition opportunities on the table.
The Springboks give you very few windows to hit them and this was one that passed Murray by.
I felt Alun Wyn Jones had a pretty poor game, on the whole, by his standards. He worked hard in defence, for sure, but the impact of his contributions was questionable on the offensive side of the ball and at the maul, where the Springboks drove through him on a few occasions.
I felt that Jack Conan struggled with the tighter role he found himself in as the game unfolded. I believe Jack Conan is better deployed as a wide ball carrier but in a game where the Lions flyhalf passed the ball three times, there were no real opportunities for him to hit that role regularly. He could have just stayed in those wider slots but the lack of go-forward and the tightening of the game drew him into the tighter exchanges where I don’t feel he excels against the size that the Springboks have off #9 and further out.
On the positive side, I thought Mako Vunipola and Maro Itoje had productive games. Vunipola managed to win a few offensive and defensive collisions, plus the scrum fell apart when he left the field. Maro Itoje wasn’t near the performance of last week but he was the standout back five forward for me on a day without many highlights for the Lions in that department.
The Wally Ratings: South Africa (A)
The Wally Ratings explainer page is here.
Players are rated based on their time on the pitch, if they were playing notably out of position, and on the overall curve of the team performance. DNP means the player did not feature and N/A means they weren’t on the pitch long enough to warrant a fair rating.
| Names | Rating |
|---|---|
| Mako Vunipola | ★★★ |
| Luke Cowan-Dickie | ★★ |
| Tadhg Furlong | ★★ |
| Maro Itoje | ★★★ |
| Alun Wyn Jones | ★★ |
| Courtney Lawes | ★★ |
| Tom Curry | ★★ |
| Jack Conan | ★★ |
| Conor Murray | ★★ |
| Dan Biggar | ★★ |
| Duhan Van Der Merwe | ★★ |
| Robbie Henshaw | ★★ |
| Chris Harris | ★★ |
| Anthony Watson | ★ |
| Stuart Hogg | ★★ |
| Ken Owen | ★★ |
| Rory Sutherland | ★★ |
| Kyle Sinckler | ★★ |
| Tadhg Beirne | N/A |
| Taulupe Faletau | ★★ |
| Ali Price | ★★ |
| Owen Farrell | ★★ |
| Elliot Daly | ★★ |
