Andrew Porter is one of the best tight five forwards in the world.
In 2021, Porter managed to build up his body of work as a tighthead – after an initial switch from loosehead in 2017 – to the point that he got selected to tour with the Lions alongside Tadhg Furlong and Zander Fagerson before injury took it away from him. It was a serious achievement in the first place when you consider that most of Porter’s significant minutes against elite opposition for Leinster and Ireland came off the bench for Furlong. Most guys play most of their career as a starter and never come close to the Lions. Porter managed it averaging 36 minutes a game during the 2021 Six Nations and just 35 minutes in the Champions Cup for Leinster.
It seems like the decision to switch over to loosehead came during the middle of the 2021 off-season after he missed out on the Lions tour but it had been in the offing for quite a while before that. There were three main reasons for this – tactical, personal and financial.
From a tactical perspective, Leinster and Ireland were keen to get Porter’s undoubted power and impact onto the field for longer without reducing the minutes available to Furlong. Before the switch, Ireland could use either Furlong OR Porter, never both at the same time, so the idea was that by making the switch over to loosehead, Ireland could deploy our two biggest and most impactful props on the field at the same time. From a personal perspective, Andrew Porter is an ambitious guy who understands that as he moves into his mid-to-late 20s that he’s got to be seen as a starter at club and country. That would not be impossible with Furlong ahead of him but it would be considered incredibly unlikely barring a catastrophic series of injuries, especially with Tadhg Furlong on a central contract with the IRFU. That leads us to the next stage – financial. Andrew Porter’s provincial contract with Leinster was coming due at the end of the 2021/22 season. He was certainly performing well enough to be considered a central contract tier player for the IRFU as far back as mid-2020 but that would be a difficult deal to make from a perception and budget management perspective.
Having two centrally contracted tightheads – one three years younger than the other – playing in the same province would not only be risky from an Irish perspective, but it would also block off that positional depth chart to any young player coming up behind them for the guts of two World Cup cycles. Tighthead is a two-man position in 2022, every elite side has two quality operators there but there is always a 1A and a 1B. Your primary guy gets paid more. If you have a 1B who could easily be a 1A at another club of similar stature, then you have to pay 1A money to retain them. Your starting/finishing patterns won’t change but, suddenly, you’re now paying the 1B player more money per minute than the 1A player while losing prospects from the layer below with no way to promise them anything other than injury cover minutes when contract time rolls around. Some young lads would take the money because it’s comfortable and they’re happy to wait around but you don’t want to get stuck with too many guys like that in your squad either. Essentially, if they were serious players, they wouldn’t sign any contract that would lock them in as a third-choice tighthead for as long as Porter and Furlong are contracted together. That’s how you end up with a general lowering of standards in a position over time. Just look at Munster’s second-row post-O’Connell-O’Callaghan and Ryan as an example.
If Andrew Porter were to move over to loosehead, however, none of that applies. You can easily give him a central contract – and Ireland did just that – because now he’s a 60-minute player that you can pair with Furlong in big games. It also answers the “who do we replace Cian Healy with” problem that was building away in the background while opening up the depth chart in the medium term at tighthead for guys like Clarkson and others.
You can then use the money you were spending on Porter (a significant sum) to re-enforce other areas of the squad without going off-budget. When I see guys like Jenkins and Ngatai coming in, I don’t look at it through the lens of being at the expense of Dunne, O’Loughlin, Murphy and others leaving – I see a lot of space freed up by Porter’s switch, both to loosehead and onto a central contract.
Everything worked perfectly.
The only possible cloud on the horizon for Ireland and Leinster is if Porter’s switch to loosehead came with a downside at the scrum.
I don’t think anyone expected Porter to move over to loosehead and then immediately start roasting tightheads like he’d been doing it all his career. To be honest, I think most people involved in the decision at a high level expected that there would be some rough days out, at least initially, as Porter got used to the demands of the position. Midway through 2021/22, Porter had no real issues for Ireland during the Autumn Nations Cup, albeit against three sides not known for their dominant tighthead side scrummaging and he had zero issues for Leinster. You got the feeling that a full-on scrummaging experience against Montpellier would be a good challenge for Porter but Leinster never got that in either fixture during the pool stages.
I said at the time that Porter’s real scrummaging tests would come in the Six Nations and… they did.
But before we get to that, we have to acknowledge the changes in body shape that Porter has made during the last season and a half. It’s hard to get a proper read on any player’s weight given how much distortion happens on official sites but, according to the man himself, Porter was 120kg+ in May 2020.
This is only my third season as a professional and I’m still trying to find my fighting weight. I’ve tried to stay at 120kg over the last year. Before that, in my first year of under-20s, I was 113kg, but in my second year I rocketed up to 128kg.
As of right now, Porter is listed at 114kg on both the Irish and Leinster sites which would make him the lightest he’s been in seven seasons and it represents a cut of 6/7kg at the very least over the last two seasons. That, in itself, makes sense. In his previous role as the 1B to Furlong, Porter could easily afford to be north of 120kg as a tighthead because he averaged 36 minutes a game during his seasons in that role. As a starting loosehead – especially in Leinster and Ireland’s counter-transition style – it would make sense for Porter to slim down to the average weight for the position, which is around 115kg but that doesn’t come without risks. The advantages of playing lighter are clear when it comes to cardio, phase play output and durability in-game, especially when your usage per game increases by 10 minutes per game on average year on year for Leinster and Ireland as Porter’s did.
But when you play lighter, you can find that you lack that extra bit of tractor when it comes to the scrum and maul which, when you are used to playing “heavier”, can be disorientating. Movements that stuck and didn’t budge at 120kg can become a little more… pliable without that bulk anchoring you.
Everything else about Porter’s game was exactly as you’d expect post-switch. He loads up on offensive ruck entries. He’s a breakdown threat and an impactful defender. A good lineout lifter. A very solid ball carrier without being a guy you’d classify as a power forward but he balances that by being a very talented passer of the ball. It was everything Leinster and Ireland needed from him.
Porter’s change in body shape was a full-on example of how hard Porter was throwing himself into the switch but that would only be properly assessed at the end of the season once the bigger scrummaging tests of the Six Nations and European knock-outs.
Leinster and Ireland’s gambit that the scrum has been depowered as an engine that can win or lose the game was a smart one. Bar a few obvious exceptions – that you will immediately think of when I say that because they are so rare these days – the scrum has become a platform where 90% plus retention is commonplace. Referees just don’t like having the scrum decide the game via penalties these days in all but the most obvious of cases because (a) it’s incredibly complex to referee accurately 100% of the time and (b) both sides are trying to fool you.
It is a game of perception more than anything. If you are perceived to be a dangerous scrummager, you will be treated like one in all but the most obvious of penalty scenarios. Are you boring in illegally or absolutely dominating the poor fucker scrummaging against you? The referee decides that and reputation counts for a lot.
Porter’s scrummaging on the loosehead side of the scrum wasn’t really tested prior to the Six Nations and a ropey day out against Wales and France started to pose a few questions that weren’t there before. Nine scrum penalties conceded in two games against Leicester and Toulouse added to those questions and two more iffy days out against La Rochelle and the Bulls started a dangerous conversation and it’s this. Is Andrew Porter beginning to be perceived as a weak scrummager?
If this idea starts to get into the heads of referees, it can be incredibly damaging because anything that makes their job easier – such as the idea that X player is a weak scrummager so if the scrum is messy, he’s probably to blame – can become a problem that is incredibly difficult to overcome.
Leinster’s defeat to the Bulls did not help that perception but the problems aren’t Porter’s alone in the scrum.
The best way to visualise some of the units in the scrum is to imagine two interlocking triangles.
The loosehead and hooker are the base of one triangle with the loosehead lock at the apex. The tighthead is the apex of the other triangle with the tighthead lock and flanker as the base. The #8 has a very important role locking both triangles together, with the flankers adding different pressures and bracing on different sides where necessary depending on which team has the put in and where the scrum is taking place.
The main differences that Andrew Porter would be experiencing this season is a dramatic drop in the amount of pressure going through him and most of his scrummaging now being done with his right side, as opposed to going through both shoulders. One of the biggest changes that tightheads switching to loosehead notice is that “unbalancing” change in pressure and almost a feeling of not knowing what to do with your left arm. How do you use it to attack? How do you use it change the level of the engagement? How do you use it to manipulate and dominate the tighthead in tandem with your hooker? The role of the hooker is extremely important to the success of the loosehead prop but it’s rarely spoken about. That’s understandable, actually, because the props are the most visible component of a scrum doing well or poorly. The hooker just seems to be “there” but it couldn’t be further from the truth – the hooker is vital to the scrum and not just when it comes to hooking the ball.
This article is about Andrew Porter’s scrummaging, yes, but it could equally be about Dan Sheehan, at this stage.
Is it a coincidence that most of Andrew Porter’s scrum wobbles have been when he’s been packing down next to Dan Sheehan?
When the Irish scrum got evaporated in Paris, it was no surprise to me that it was when Ronan Kelleher was forced off the field. It was the same in the Champions Cup final. Dan Sheehan is a great ball-carrying hooker and a really good lineout thrower but, at 6’3″, scrummaging was always going to be a potential issue for him. The taller the hooker and the longer the distance between his ass and shoulders relative to the props alongside him, the more the second rows have to distort away from a solid square pushing position to get proper contact with both their prop and the hooker.
If there is any kind of diagonal pressure from the opposition tighthead through to the hooker, it can uncouple the hooker from his tighthead lock and collapse the scrum across as if the opposition’s tighthead is driving through towards the flanker on the side across from him.
If we play the above scrum on a few frames, we can already see Leinster’s tighthead lock is popped up away from Sheehan. This is, in part, because of the fundamentally weak, tilted position he was in as he started.
You’ll often see Sheehan sitting quite high on the engaged stance of the locks behind him and that “height” is something that regularly gets used against him. When Porter is scrummaging with Sheehan, he seems more likely to either collapse inwards or get into trouble with his elbow and his binds. That can be a side-effect of the pop and bore technique that teams have cottoned onto with Sheehan. The same issue doesn’t seem to happen as regularly or as consistently when Porter is scrummaging with Kelleher.
That said, it’s not all Sheehan’s issue, not by a long way. I’ve seen Porter struggle with his binding and painting bad pictures to referees, like his elbow consistently pointing down as he fights for position and angle. Against the Bulls, he had a really rough time with Van Rooyen, even completely independently of any issues Sheehan was having.
You can see a lot of those issues here;
Some of this is to do with what’s going on with Sheehan and behind, but some of this is just straight up getting dominated by Van Rooyen from the bind on up. Porter still seems a little locked in to the tighthead tendency of locking low and driving through because he consistently looks for that shape as he struggles for position.
Porter was regularly giving up body positions like this against the Bulls where his outside shoulder gets dipped, his elbow points straight to the grass and his core twisted in – totally depowering him.
Until that gets fixed, teams with bigger, heavier tightheads will consistently target him on the fundamentals like attacking him at the binding level and dominating his shape. He’s one of the strongest props in the game but that’s being taken away from him as the season goes on.
Referees will be looking at those pictures of Porter’s elbow pointing down – opposition coaches will be looking for “clarity” ahead of games, you may bet – and begin to start making up their minds before the scrum. It’ll take a big body of work for Porter to turn this around. He’s more than capable of it, but if he can’t it’ll make the switch to loosehead very expensive, in more ways than one.
