These Work Rate articles are always my favourite part of the week. Do I enjoy going frame by frame on big rugby games to see who did what at the breakdown, despite it being an extraordinarily monotonous task? Yes. I enjoy digging into the details of a performance, the nuts and bolts of how things came to be and who helped to push those things into reality.
The offensive ruck is a massive focus of mine when I’m assessing performances because if the ruck is the engine of the game – and it is – then what happens there is vitally important.
My philosophy on my ratings here is simple; if you make an entry to the breakdown it has to be worth coming out of the attacking line for. If you fly in off your feet and miss your target, that is an Ineffective Entry to me regardless of whether you were there first or not. Not all ruck arrivals are created equally but they are often rated by companies like Opta in a very basic way. Your attendance and the order of attendance are about as good as you get but it doesn’t tell even a quarter of the story.
You can tell the playing personality of your players by noting what they do at the ruck and how they do it.
I have some points that I want to focus on in this article, which will cover the ORW scores from both the Scotland game AND the England game in the run to winning the Slam last weekend.
I’ll show both scoring tables, note the top five scorers in both games and then move on to the next segment.
IRELAND’S OFFENSIVE RUCK WORK SCORE VS SCOTLAND
- A Dominant Clean is an action that decisively secures possession when the ball carrier takes contact. A Dominant Clean does not have to be the first arrival at the breakdown but it is rewarded in the context of effectiveness. We will assign this action 3 points.
- A Guard Action is where a player plays a role in helping to retain possession after we have “re-won” the ball on the floor. Sometimes this can happen on a carry/ruck point where there is no active contention by the opposition. Let’s assign this action 2 points.
- An Attendance can be anything from standing as a “kick shield” on a ruck to adding a bit of bulk to ward against a counter-ruck. I’m marking this down as being worth 1 point.
- An Ineffective Action is a blown cleanout, a lean, a breakdown penalty or an action that I couldn’t see any direct benefit for. This will be worth -2 points.
| Dominant Clean | Guard Action | Attendance | Ineffective | Ruck Work Score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Porter | 1 | 21 | 1 | 1 | 44 |
| Sheehan | 5 | 10 | |||
| Furlong | 2 | 15 | 4 | 40 | |
| Henderson | 1 | 8 | 1 | 20 | |
| Ryan | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3 | 24 |
| O'Mahony | 4 | 9 | 2 | 1 | 30 |
| Van Der Flier | 2 | 28 | 2 | 1 | 62 |
| Doris | 1 | 3 | 9 | ||
| Murray | 1 | 3 | |||
| Sexton | 4 | 8 | |||
| Lowe | 1 | 2 | 1 | 5 | |
| Aki | 1 | 4 | 2 | 7 | |
| Ringrose | 2 | 7 | 20 | ||
| Hansen | 1 | 5 | 1 | 11 | |
| Keenan | 3 | 9 | 1 | 25 | |
| Kelleher | 6 | 2 | 14 | ||
| Healy | 3 | 6 | |||
| O'Toole | 4 | 8 | |||
| Baird | 3 | 10 | 1 | 27 | |
| Conan | 2 | 13 | 3 | 26 | |
| Gibson-Park | 0 | ||||
| Byrne | 0 | ||||
| Henshaw | 1 | 2 |
Top Five ORW Scorers vs Scotland
- Josh Van Der Flier – 62 points
- Andrew Porter – 44 points
- Furlong – 40 points
- O’Mahony – 30 points
- Baird – 27 points
IRELAND’S OFFENSIVE RUCK WORK SCORE VS ENGLAND
- A Dominant Clean is an action that decisively secures possession when the ball carrier takes contact. A Dominant Clean does not have to be the first arrival at the breakdown but it is rewarded in the context of effectiveness. We will assign this action 3 points.
- A Guard Action is where a player plays a role in helping to retain possession after we have “re-won” the ball on the floor. Sometimes this can happen on a carry/ruck point where there is no active contention by the opposition. Let’s assign this action 2 points.
- An Attendance can be anything from standing as a “kick shield” on a ruck to adding a bit of bulk to ward against a counter-ruck. I’m marking this down as being worth 1 point.
- An Ineffective Action is a blown cleanout, a lean, a breakdown penalty or an action that I couldn’t see any direct benefit for. This will be worth -2 points.
| Dominant Clean | Guard Action | Attendance | Ineffective | Ruck Work Score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Porter | 6 | 19 | 8 | 1 | 62 |
| Sheehan | 5 | 14 | 1 | 1 | 42 |
| Furlong | 2 | 16 | 5 | 4 | 35 |
| Baird | 2 | 13 | 3 | 2 | 31 |
| Ryan | 2 | 14 | 3 | 7 | 23 |
| O'Mahony | 8 | 16 | 2 | 1 | 56 |
| Van Der Flier | 1 | 21 | 3 | 2 | 44 |
| Doris | 3 | 14 | 1 | 1 | 36 |
| Gibson-Park | 2 | 4 | |||
| Sexton | 2 | 4 | |||
| Lowe | 1 | 2 | |||
| Aki | 1 | 11 | 25 | ||
| Henshaw | 7 | 1 | 12 | ||
| Hansen | 1 | 4 | 2 | 7 | |
| Keenan | 4 | 1 | 6 | ||
| Herring | 1 | 2 | |||
| Healy | 1 | 4 | |||
| O'Toole | 2 | 4 | |||
| Treadwell | 1 | 2 | |||
| Conan | 1 | 2 | |||
| Murray | 0 | ||||
| Byrne | 0 | ||||
| O'Brien | 1 | 1 | 0 |
Top Five ORW Scorers vs England
-
- Porter – 62 points
- O’Mahony – 56 points
- Van Der Flier – 44 points
- Sheehan – 42 points
- Doris – 36 points
Honourable Mention: Ryan Baird – 31 points
Why is James Ryan ranked so low?
For me, breakdown efficiency is a big deal. Others might not rate it as highly but, for me, if you’re going to go to the effort of making an entry, it has to be of value – otherwise, you’re just taking yourself out of the next phase needlessly.
Being first to the breakdown, for me, is a meaningless stat. Here, for example, James Ryan is the first player to arrive at this ruck but he blows the cleanout on Willis completely.
He’s lucky not to give away a penalty for a neck roll when he’s at it but this isn’t counted as a turnover conceded by Ryan, only a turnover won by Jack Willis.
All throughout the game against England, Ryan was flying off his feet from a distance to increase the impact of his “strike” to the ruck. On this one, O’Mahony makes a dominant one-man clean before Ryan gets there but Ryan is always out of control here; if O’Mahony doesn’t make the cleanout Ryan is flying blind from a metre away.
In this next example, Ryan is jumping over a rolling defender but the primary possession at the ruck is secured by Gibson-Park and O’Mahony in the inside barrel. Once again, Ryan is never in control of his entry once he’s literally jumping into contact and is risking anything from a penalty to a yellow card.
I’m ok with a “by hook or by crook” approach to the ruck that allows for whatever works and isn’t whistled to be effective but Ryan isn’t even doing that in this instance.
All season long, James Ryan has had a tonne of “noise” in his breakdown work that has bothered me. Too many Attendances and far too many Ineffective Entries. His game against France was by far his best of the season but every other game was pockmarked by stuff like this, where he seems stiff and unable to readjust to a situation that’s adjusting on the fly.
If Ryan doesn’t blow this latch, we don’t lose possession but it’s O’Mahony who gets credited with the turnover, not the support player making an error.
Ryan is a core part of this team – and will remain so – but some of the praise coming his way over the last few weeks has been genuinely baffling to me, to the point that I went back over the Scotland game this week to see if I’d been unfair to him. My thought was that because I’ve long criticised Ryan’s performances post-2019 that I would subliminally rate him harsher than others because I would want to be proven right. So I went back over both games and, well, the rankings stayed the same.
Ryan didn’t get a dominant clean at the breakdown until the 38th minute of the game against England and he was on a minus score well into the first 20 minutes.
This is not a player at the top of his game, in my opinion, and while I understand that players have different roles and usages – like O’Mahony’s ruck numbers dropping from his usual 50-minute norm against Scotland to cover for Caelan Doris’ injury – Ryan’s breakdown work is something that is flying under the radar, primarily because of the work of Porter, Van Der Flier and O’Mahony.
Porter is a machine, there’s no other word for it, although you do notice that his Attendance numbers go up during periods when he’s cycling down mid-game to ensure he can go for 70+ minutes. He’s so consistent, though and constantly efficient.
The same is true for Van Der Flier, who specialises in routine, safe as houses Guard Actions that are often as simple as just clamping down on a carrier to create a ruck and, thus, an offside line. His pace, agility and instincts are incredible and he’s so rarely out of position and so often at the ruck ahead of defenders that he has far fewer dominant cleans than his peers. He doesn’t need them!
The biggest eye-opener, though, was the impact of Peter O’Mahony, who’s playing some of the best, most focused rugby of his career. O’Mahony is a dominant clean monster who consistently wins one-man cleans from deep positions at pace.
His ability to fire-fight at pace is a huge bonus for Ireland. This moment right before he was substituted won’t get many highlights but he saved an almost certain three-point penalty with this Dominant Clean on Mack Hansen.
He’s accurate, he’s efficient and for me he’s at his best when he’s emptying the tank for 50 minutes at the lineout and at the offensive ruck.
That balance between Porter, Van Der Flier and O’Mahony stabilised Ireland’s possession map in the absence of Beirne to such a degree that it can carry real inefficiency elsewhere in the pack.
