I wasn’t meant to be playing that day.
I wasn’t meant to be playing at all actually, now that I think about it. It was five or six years ago. I was in Italy working as a part-time performance analyst, a part-time underage coach, a part-time Venetian tour guide, part-time barman, part-time waiter and, on one wet Sunday afternoon, a part-time player in the lower tiers of local Italian rugby after a bunch of the local first-team players were made unavailable because of a wedding. The game wasn’t supposed to be on a Sunday but had been moved by the tournament organisers. The wedding was on Sunday (for luck) but you’d need all that good luck if you planned on telling an Italian bride and her mother that you, your brothers and your childhood friends couldn’t attend the wedding because of a league game 100 kilometres down the road.
The groom, wanting to live a long, healthy life, decided to take the smart route and binned off the game and his brothers and friends did the same.
I began to notice that something was up when the first-team coach texts me on the Wednesday before the game.
For context, the coach never texted me. He didn’t give one single shit about my analysis, or video analysis in general, because he liked to only focus on what his team did and, besides the point, he felt that video analysis was a form of unseemly cheating. I was only there at all because the president of the club liked the website I did for him for €300 and, when he asked me what he could do for me in return, I said: “bump up my coaching CV pretty please?” so he planted me in as a video analyst and underage coach. He also loved the idea of Ireland and the Irish because (a) he thought we were good luck and (b) he thought Ireland was a magical, foggy island in the Atlantic that fascinated him, even though he had never been there but that’s another story.
Anyway, the text said, “you are free Sunday”.
There wasn’t a question mark. He knew I was “free Sunday” because I was supposed to be at the game videoing it. Those four words told me all I needed to know. I would finally be of actual use to him.
When I text him back saying that I was supposed to be at the game doing video, he clarified that he wanted to know if I was down to play on Sunday.
I suppose I was.
“It is OK,” he texted back. “We have a tripod for the camera.”
Replaced by €30 bit of plastic? A new low.
So anyway, I would be needed at training the day after to get into what we were doing. I wanted to play in the forwards but he didn’t buy my usual trick of turning my 5’11” into a togged out 6’1″ and told me I was too small for the back row. It would have to be the backs. I could still carry a ball at that point, so I was put into midfield to replace the Best Man. The other wedding attendees were replaced by a ragtag bunch of ringers who would be pretending to be registered players for the purposes of this league game, refereed as it was by a ref from outside the regional fed.
The team we played that Sunday contained six of the biggest guys I’d ever seen on the same pitch like me, at that point. I’d been wiped out by lads on the field before of course – in New Zealand, for example – but none of those guys were dramatically bigger than me in my gigantic togged out state of 6’1″.
Their pack had three guys that were legitimately around 6’6″. One of their second rows was coming up on 6’8″. One of their props was around 6’2″ but hauling 19 stone around under it without a massive gut, which is always scary. The guy playing opposite me in midfield looked around 6’4″ and had shoulders so wide you could legitimately fit two heads either side of his real head and it wouldn’t look crowded.
That day I saw our pack get absolutely annihilated. Out-jumped, out scrummaged, out-mauled, blown back in contact and, to put a technical term on it, absolutely nuked to within an inch of their lives. I ran into the Roman God Mars in the midfield three or four times on the crash and it felt like running into a large pile of stones. I didn’t find one collision that I wouldn’t lose. Well, actually, I did manage to run over their scrumhalf off a scrum but that was a bit like taking pride in getting the shit kicked out of you by Mike Tyson but breaking his knuckle with your forehead.
My day was spent running into brick walls and waving lads through in defence like runway marshalls in Top Gun.
And these guys weren’t even very good.
We only lost by 15 points (I think) on the day because they might have looked (and felt) like Thor and his buddies but they had hands like the Teletubbies.
That game informed me on the reality of the vast majority of rugby games once you get into adulthood. Size wins you games. It was true six years ago and it’s even truer today.
This 891-word intro should serve as a pallet cleanser for the unpleasant truth that I’m going to reveal in the second half of this article.
***
The days of rugby being a game for all shapes and sizes is long gone.
That’s not 100% true, of course, there are exceptions where you can afford to carry smaller, more skilful players without penalty – scrumhalf, flyhalf and one of your wingers. You can maybe carry a smaller hooker and back row, but only if you replace their size differential elsewhere in the pack from the start and off the bench.
Just watching the game over the last two seasons would tell you the value of size in the modern game. Having eight subs to use during a game allows you to completely replace four of your five tight-five forwards and one back row.
If you use a 6/2 split, you can choose to replace your entire tight five and a back-row forward to keep up the physical pressure on the opposition. That physical pressure – and your ability to maintain it – is a key part of the game in 2020.
Don’t believe me? Look at the recent World Cup and tell me who won and how.
South Africa with a 6/2 split in almost every game and replacing their front five completely as the game wore on.
Don’t want to look at the Boks? Look at the finalists of the Champions Cup over the last five years. Look at Saracens. Look at Racing 92. Look at Leinster. Look at Toulon and Clermont Auvergne in 2015. Size, power, weight and impact to burn in the front five, both starting and off the bench.
Every trend we see in the modern game points towards packs getting taller and heavier, in that order and the metrics back that up. Those numbers go up to 2015 but I promise you that players haven’t gotten smaller and lighter in the last four years.
If we look at the last few seasons, the average height and weight of the front fives that have contested the World Cup final and the last two Champions Cups are;
Front Row
Average Height including hookers: 1.82m (6’0″)
Average Weight including hookers: 117kg (18st 4lbs)
Average Height of Props excluding hookers: 1.84m (6’1″)
Average Weight of Props excluding hookers: 120kg (18st 9lbs)
Lock
Average Height: 2.01m (6’7″)
Average Weight: 120kg (18st 7lbs)
Yes, there’s some crossover here with regards to personnel between England and Saracens but the averages per teamsheet come out to these numbers. When you compare those averages to the 2015 numbers, you can see the differences.
The average weight of a prop in the 2015 Six Nations was 116.9kg. The average height and weight of a second row in the 2015 Six Nations was 2.00m and 119.7kg.
So players are getting taller and heavier and, when we look at the sides contending for championships, we see plenty of outliers above the average when we consider height and weight in the front five – Frans Malherbe, RG Snyman, Eben Etzebeth, Lood De Jager, Will Skelton, Tadhg Furlong, Andrew Porter, Mako Vunipola, Vincent Koch, James Ryan – are some of the most effective players in their positions playing the game in 2020.
Hooker is an outlier position all on its own. South Africa, for example, used Bongi Mbonambi – 5’9″ and 17 stone – as a set-piece and breakdown specialist with Malcolm Marx coming off the bench. Marx, a more powerful carrier and defensive hitter but less accurate in the lineout, was the perfect combination for South Africa to keep the pressure up across the replacements.
When you combine that size with simple setups off #9, like here, you win more collisions, create situations where you can win more penalties by hurting the opposition defence.
Courtney Lawes is far from a weak tackler but what can he do against De Jager and Malherbe with Mbonambi latching?
Having that narrow power sets up more expansive work elsewhere;
England are sold on the physical threats so the pullback pass creates an angle for the 10 and 15 to work with that involves the wingers with positive space to play into. The size and weight in the spaces close to the ruck create the space for the backs to attack.
From a set-piece perspective, height and weight are important in different scenarios such as scrum, lineout, maul and there’s not too much to explain with that. Stuff like scrummaging ability is an x-factor that can hurt a player’s effectiveness but, at the top level, it’s rare enough to see players who you have to make a tradeoff between scrummaging ability and their physicality in loose play. The lineout is becoming even more of an arms race from a height perspective, especially when you consider that a lot of top sides are going for taller and heavier jumping options in the back row – the way Saracens use Itoje, Leinster use Scott Fardy, and South Africa use Du Toit or Racing use Palu/Chouzenoux – as regular selection options.
My point is that if you want to compete at the top level these days, you’ve got to have a set of physical characteristics that fit the bill in the front five and, in reality, it’s really a front nine (or ten) when you consider replacements. The more height and weight you can cram into your front five plus four, the more space you have to vary it up in your back row and beyond. Those athletes aren’t growing on trees though, so you’ll need to ID and develop suitable players who can either put on the weight required without upping their injury profile or who have the height and frame that you can build on.
Once you have that front five + four, you’ll be in a much better position to challenge for Championships.
