How do you beat line speed?

That’s the question that has been bedevilling attack coaches for the last number of years. Ireland, Saracens, South Africa, England, Wales – they all use variations of a high blitz and “bordering on offside” starting points to help win collisions, pressurise attacking sides and remove creative space.

Creative Space is the gold standard in attacking rugby because not only is it literal physical space, it’s also time. On Saturday, the All Blacks took away Ireland’s blitz and gave Mo’unga and Barrett all the time they’d need to stress our defensive line to breaking point by providing all the Creative Space they’d ever want.

They tell you that it’s about playing flat to the gain line, but it’s not. That is sometimes the end product but the key to the All Blacks attacking success was in Depth and Width.

Let’s have a look.

This is a typical looking All Black openside shape. I’ll compare it to an Irish set further down, but look at how deep Mo’unga stands from the gainline.

Mo’unga isn’t tucked in behind his screen – he’s almost 10 metres away from the Irish defensive line – and the “screen” of Whitelock/Moody isn’t looking like it’s going to carry into Ireland’s defensive line or swing a ball around to Mo’unga sliding across.

The screen is there to (a) blunt Ireland’s narrow line speed from the ruck by idling into their chase lines and (b) break the Irish line by separating the ruck defence from the midfield press. You can see the break in the Irish line quite clearly here and again, look at the depth Read has from the defensive line when he takes the pass from Mo’unga.

Laulala is Read’s “screen” in that he’s running a blocking line into the middle of the oncoming Irish defence.

Savea and Cane are legitimate passing options for Read that Furlong and Henderson have to address.

Laulala’s blocking like and Savea/Cane’s passing depth creates another “pry point” for the All Blacks to attack. Read has options to pass – you’ll see him feint towards them – and, with Lualala running a block line on O’Mahony, Read has an angle to attack that isn’t just a collision.

The green space behind Best and Furlong is an Offload Lane.

Savea has a key role here in that he’s an offload option and a ruck support player. Laulala has ran ahead of Read to create an obstacle that O’Mahony has to get beyond, leaving Read to attack Best’s left shoulder after he sells a pass to Savea.

Have a look at how this “pry point” works with Laulala creating a positive carrying point for Read to attack;

At the moment of contact on the ground, Laulala turns into a close-range ruck support player with Savea assessing the options until the last minute as to whether he needs to hit the ruck or look for a pass off the ground.

Ireland ended up winning a penalty on this move thanks to O’Mahony and Stander’s braced jackal. The All Blacks might say that Best’s angle of entry over the ruck after the tackle was from the side and prevented Savea from getting a shot on O’Mahony to help win the ruck for New Zealand but you can’t always get these calls.

The basic principle is that New Zealand are willing to lose ground from a technical perspective – the ruck is further back than the one that preceded it – by playing deeper off the ruck. Playing deeper gives them a look at attacking and isolating the opponent’s blitz for carries/offloads or playing off unorganised defensive rucks on subsequent phases.

Depth and width is the key.

Here’s another example and we’ll use an average one just to illustrate what they’re trying to do even when they aren’t doing it perfectly. Look at the All Blacks “forward screen” on this phase.

Lualala chops into the Irish line to space it out as they track across and Lienert-Brown takes the bailout option to Whitelock after he spots O’Mahony’s blitz on the edge.

Without that advance from O’Mahony, I think we’d see the All Blacks go through Barrett to attack wide again. As it is, Whitelock gets a decent carry and earns a centre-field position for the All Blacks.

From there, they go back to their depth again. Look at how hard Stander – one of Ireland’s more mobile forwards – is working to close down Mo’unga here on the first phase.

The All Blacks earn their first points from this penalty but depth is the key at all times. Look at the picture that Whitelock has to work with when he received the ball from Mo’unga.

Because he started deep off Mo’unga’s initial depth, Whitelock had a built-in buffer to work with. Sexton has had to advance 5 metres into space and naturally slow down once he gets to Whitelock in advance of a question – “Is he carrying or passing?”.

Now, Ireland don’t have line speed – our defenders are slowing down and turning in while the All Blacks are running onto the ball.

Henshaw gets a good stop on Savea – look at Lienert-Brown attacking the Offload Space – and while the All Blacks have lost ground technically, they have disrupted Ireland’s defensive integrity.

On the next phase, you get a good example of how Mo’unga’s depth and width chops out tight pillar defenders and creates isolations.

The pass from Smith to Mo’unga takes out three Irish defenders and sets the isolation on the edge into place. Look at how his line is always looking to slide away from the ruck defenders

If Stockdale doesn’t slap this down, there’s a high likelihood that Reece gets a one on one with Kearney in the backfield and scores.

The All Blacks managed to disrupt our defence while arguably overcommitting bodies to the central ruck. They had 9 active attacking players against 13 active Irish defenders.

There’s even a numbers mismatch in Ireland’s favour on the side of the ruck that the All Blacks attack. The depth of the alignment and the width on the pass creates constant positive outcomes but there isn’t much “structure” on these sequences outside of the depth they encourage.

Ireland, for the most part, don’t play with the same level of depth on key attacking phases and focus more on structured phases leading to a key moment. I’m not saying it’s worse, but it does put a lot of pressure on the key creative player from a movement and carrying perspective, especially when we’re in the middle of a three/four ruck strike move in open play.

These strike plays, a Schmidt hallmark, have a set outcome planned for all parts of it so reading too much into individual phases from a “metres gained” POV isn’t really productive.

The one constant is Sexton.

Have a look at this sequence of phases.

You can see Sexton’s hard, tight lines buzzing from behind the screen to the “open” position at 06:36 on the match clock. The Irish midfield pod of Ryan and Furlong are very shallow off Sexton’s “open” position and that’s consistent with Ireland not really looking for a linebreak here. We’re trying to draw the All Blacks around to unbalance their narrow defensive line for the “strike”, which comes afterwards, and it targeted at their ruck pillar defenders.

It’s a hair away from coming off. If Best gets this pass away to Earls over his right shoulder, this is a try for Ireland under the posts but that’s the issue – it requires three complex actions to come off on this phase to get the result we want.

• Sexton has draw out the B defender and pass back inside. We managed that part.
• Henderson has to (a) get to the previous ruck and (b) block off Smith covering the gap left on the previous ruck.

• Best has to release the pass to Earls or Murray coming through in support.

Two of the three gets you a linebreak but not a try. We reset from this quite well and managed to get good depth and width once we went “off structure”.

Again, we’re an earlier pass from Earls away from generating the break but you can see the difference in relative depth to the gain line and how it cuts down on the margin of error.

The All Blacks, on the other hand, are less structured phase for phase. They prefer to stack deep runners with enough time to read the defence’s reactions and then attack with players transitioning to passing or ruck support roles depending on the context.

Look at the depth the All Blacks take on this openside play and how it manipulates the “order” out of the Irish press.

They aren’t afraid to put time on the ball going wide because it draws out the Irish blitz and gives their runners isolations to work with and crucially, Creative Space. In the above instance, Lienert-Brown takes the ball with Ringrose and Earls floating in front of him. Their linespeed is gone because the ball moved beyond the point of their blitz and put Lienert-Brown in the perfect position to stress Ireland’s wide defensive alignment.

The width that the All Blacks get on this play forces the heavier Irish centre-field defenders – Healy, Ryan, etc – to reset at pace and even start to tax the gas tank of guys like Van Der Flier, Ringrose and Earls.

Retallick steps in to keep the pace going and when the ball resets, we’re back to our first GIF in this article.

You can’t play like this without two playmakers and a high level of passing amongst the squad at large from 1-15.

The All Blacks don’t have huge ball carriers. They have an athletic and mobile pack but man for man, Ireland have bigger carriers. So what did they do? Over the past three years they’ve started widening and deepening their game and, in doing so, have shown other sides who don’t have a huge roster of heavy ball carriers how they can play, if they back their skill set.