Rugby isn’t all about big ball carriers but that isn’t to say they aren’t really, really, REALLY important to the prospects of success of any rugby team.
If you have a lot of ball carriers in your team – my ideal number is seven (five forwards, two backs or four forwards, three backs) – you will be more capable of generating the kind of opportunities that your finesse players can take advantage of, as long as you can retain your own ball ruck to ruck. The fewer ball carriers your have in your side, the more “playing” you have to do to generate the kind of linebreaks you need to score the tries that will win you games and then trophies. The more “playing” you have to do, the more you can be affected by X factor issues like weather conditions, one of your creative players having an off day, etc.
To understand why ball carriers are important, you have to stop looking at the actual carrying of the ball. We’ve all seen those big, one-off carries before but it’s the collective threat of the ball carriers as a unified force that creates the most amount of reliable chance creation.
When you look at the winners of the Heineken Cup – I’m just calling it that now, by the way – over the last five or six years as the laws have tweaked and settled, you can see a familiar pattern.
Look at Leinster in last year’s final – five heavy ball carriers starting with two coming off the bench. Those five heavy ball carriers were; Furlong, Healy, Ryan, Leavy, Henshaw with Porter and Conan off the bench. The year before, Saracens had Mako and Billy Vunipola, George Kruis, Michael Rhodes, Brad Barritt and Marcelo Bosch. Before that, you had Toulon with Bastareud, Guirado, Smith, Masoe and Williams/Botha with Fernandez Lobbe on the bench.
All of those winning sides had one thing in common and that’s a stacked roster of high quality, heavy duty ball carriers in the forwards and backs.
If Munster are to get into that company, they need to find a similar basic formula. Of course, all of those three winning sides played different games but the base ingredient was still based on the strength of their ball carrying roster in the key action areas of the pitch. They were all able to follow up each phase with powerful running options on every likely vector of attack.
Let’s have a look at a phase sequence.
Phase 1
This is the first ruck, on the far left touchline as we look over the goal posts. The defensive sides have four units, spread out in two layers and our ideal attacking side from a ball carrying perspective has four ball-carrying threats spread out across the field.
We only have three attacking units but we have the advantage in width. Let’s break down the attacking alignment and highlight who our heavy ball-carrying threats on this openside play are in a yellow box.
Our loosehead and tighthead prop are in Carrying Block 1. Our big ball carrying lock forward is in Carrying Block 2 with our big hitter #8. Then, outside them, we have our big outside centre and a massive runner on the wing in #11. Our other ball carrier, #7, is in a ruck at the start of this sequence.
To give you an archetype of who I’m talking about here, here’s a list of our hypothetical ball carriers to give you an idea of the type of player I’m talking about here;
#1: Mako Vunipola
#3: Tadhg Furlong
#5: James Ryan
#8: CJ Stander
#13: Mathieu Bastareud
#11: Ratu Alivereti Raka
On this phase, our halfbacks are going to hinge a ball into #3, where #1 and #4 will secure.
Phase 2
We’ve got decent centre ruck position and our two heavy ball carriers have drawn in three opposition defenders to the ruck point and compressed the defence. On the left side, we have a heavy ball option off #10 while on the right, we have two extremely credible ball-carrying options.
The first is a wider play;
#9 gets the ball to #2 from the ruck and, using the threat of our heavy ball carriers Ryan and Stander, we can get the ball to #12, who can attack around the corner and feed the ball to Bastareud to attack the edge of the defence.
If #15 makes a tackle we have an offload option but #6 can secure the ruck if needs be. If #13 can’t make it we have hands options to the outside and a guy like Raka to finish. The initial carry makes the ground, the threat of the middle carry opens up space and the dominant running of the outside carry constantly eats up decision making bandwidth in the opposition.
Even if we go for the relatively simple option here – a pass to Ryan with a tip on to Stander – you can see how the carrying “umbrella” opens up opportunities when we go to Phase 3.
Phase 3
Now we have multiple options to work with as the defence folds around the corner. Even if we give them a good slow down at the ruck and a good fold, the physical pressure of the next phase would tell eventually.
Heavy ball carriers compress the opposition and create space for other players. The above phase example shows the kind of pressure a rotating The presence of heavy ball carriers in the backs – the 9th/10th forward – is a vital component of any side that wants to win things.
Ball carrying threats have to occupy the defensive thoughts of the opposition.
If they don’t then the opposition can number up man for man and make attacking look incredibly difficult.
You don’t need to have the big ball carrier at 12, or even 13. Edinburgh do very well with the wide threat of Van Der Merwe on the wing and that structure – heavy winger – is something that a lot of sides have started to use. Some sides even use twin bully wings alongside “smaller” midfield players to create the kind of carrying umbrella that can be useful.
The Munster Angle
Munster, as I’ve written about before, are a team that are set up to work in transition be it from the breakdown or on kick return. Transition attack is a growth area in the game as the third state of play – alongside attacking and defending – so having a side that can generate these turnover events through their work at the breakdown and their defensive pressure (to force kickaways) – is a vital part of any sides’ preparation. You still need to build phase pressure though and that causes issues for Munster when it comes to creating a carrying umbrella.
Against Castres, Munster had Stander and Kilcoyne as players I would describe as heavy carriers that could set defenders. Tadhg Beirne was playing that role as best as possible but I wouldn’t say it’s his natural area for carrying the ball, especially on a pitch like the one in Castres.
When you look at Munster’s backline, you don’t see where the natural ball carriers are. You have fantastic outside backs; Earls and Conway are elite while Haley is showing what he’s got with every passing week but the midfield lacked the kind of “9th forward” carrier we needed. That isn’t to say that Rory Scannell and Sam Arnold are bad players – far, far from it – but when it comes to their carrying profile I’d say both men are more like openside flanker carriers in the wide areas as opposed to the extra blindside or #8 style carrier that a Chris Farrell or Bastareud would be.
Both Scannell and Arnold are excellent support runners and can carry really well in space created for them but they don’t, in my opinion, have the carrying profile of a “heavy carrier” in the wide areas.
Have a look at this example;
Two good carries in the heavy channels – one from Beirne and then from Stander – but when it comes time to hammer the third phase, we get swarmed by Castres and lose gainline. The ruck support from Arnold is something he’s really good at and the kind of thing I mean when I describe him as an “openside flanker” style midfield player.
The phase after sees us recover, somewhat, but we lose four men to recover the ball. When we come back inside, Castres can wipe in front of the ruck to stall off Stander’s clean out.
The problem was that we didn’t have a realistic wider option to play with. Castres could go man for man in the pod knowing that Munster didn’t have a realistic support option from the previous ruck and were unlikely to go beyond this hammer pod on this phase.
Here’s another example;
Munster go across the field quite well (look at the Earls second layer line on Carbery’s carry) and Scannell’s carry in space is perfectly fine but when we come to the last phase, ideally you’d want a dynamic, ball carrying presence on the other side of the field that could compress Castres defenders on the edge.
They weren’t there. O’Mahony is moving to the border of the strike and run zone where he does most of his business. Cloete was involved in the ruck you can see above and he’ll head off to the other wing. That leaves Stander, Kilcoyne and Beirne as the main – and only – carriers in the middle of the field and they’re all in the same area.
That means Castres can compress away in the knowledge that they have no mobile ball carrying back to fear on the next phase.
Imagine Farrell in that space between Kilcoyne and O’Mahony. Or even Beirne being further out with Kleyn as a heavy carrying option in the middle of the field. In both scenarios, Castres couldn’t afford to blitz in – as they did for most of this game and the game in Thomond Park – because of the threat of leaving a large part of the wider area open to a heavy carrier who could hurt Compezou and Lialelle one on one.
What’s the remedy? Chris Farrell doesn’t have a like for like replacement in the squad at the moment – Goggin is the closest to matching him in the #13 shirt IMO – but I think recruitment in midfield or the outside backs might be something to look at, with a “9th forward” style back to help take the style related selection pressure off our midfield ranks during international call-ups and injury crises.
When Munster are without Farrell AND Kleyn, it changes the way that we have to play on our phase plays. When Botha replaced Cloete in the second half, Arnold and Scannell immediately looked more dangerous because they could play off the space generated by Botha, Beirne, Stander and Kilcoyne in the middle of the field but it isn’t as simple as just swapping one out for the other. This kind of style building is a challenge for all sides as they juggle breakdown needs, set-piece requirements and defensive duties as well as what you do with ball in hand.
