After seven watches, I’d be fairly confident of telling you that there’s not much worth watching the entirety of Ireland vs Russia back for.
Ireland won, we got the bonus point that was a non-negotiable, and that, for the most part, is the end of the story. I got the ruck numbers from that game, in case you’re interested. It’s about the only thing worth looking at.
| Player | Dominant Action | Guard Action | Passive Action | Ineffective Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jean Kleyn | 18 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Tadhg Beirne | 15 | 5 | 3 | 2 |
| Dave Kilcoyne | 12 | 5 | 0 | 1 |
| Rhys Ruddock | 11 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| Peter O'Mahony | 10 | 8 | 3 | 0 |
| Gary Ringrose | 9 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| Jordi Murphy | 8 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Bundee Aki | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Niall Scannell | 7 | 6 | 0 | 0 |
| Andrew Porter | 6 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| Tadhg Furlong | 6 | 3 | 1 | 4 |
| Iain Henderson | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| CJ Stander | 6 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| John Ryan | 5 | 8 | 2 | 0 |
| Johnny Sexton | 3 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Keith Earls | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| Andrew Conway | 3 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Sean Cronin | 3 | 3 | 2 | 0 |
| L. McGrath | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Rob Kearney | 1 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
Great numbers for Kleyn, as you’d expect. His workrate in the dirty areas of the game is usually directly proportionate to how angry the people who rely on ESPN for their information are after a game.
But the overall nature of the collective performance in that Russian is being held up as an example of Ireland’s overall “malaise” in this tournament – well, since the loss the Japan anyway. Not many people were talking about “malaise” after the Scotland game, and rightly so.
A lot of the complaints about Ireland’s overall performance levels goes back to the loss to England in the preseason which seems to have encapsulated a lot of what people have thought about Ireland since the turn of the year. I’ve dismissed the England game as a preseason aberration, and I still feel pretty confident in that assessment, but I can see why it would have spooked people given the record score and complete collapse of everything we thought we knew about Ireland under Schmidt. In that context, you can see how the Scottish game might look like the deviation from the norm over the last year, rather than the reversion to it.
Ultimately, the majority of the complaints about Ireland’s performances to date have been how we’ve done in attack and, if we are to assess Ireland’s attack, what we’re essentially talking about is how we behave off our ruck platform depending on the context of the pitch.
There are four main behaviours when it comes to the ruck.
1: Play Off Nine
The halfback – or someone playing halfback – passes the ball to a runner close to the ruck. That runner is usually a forward but doesn’t have to be. This is the safest method of retaining possession because it contains the lowest amount of things that can go wrong; the ball travels over the smallest distance, and to a target that is usually well resourced for the next ruck. For brevity, I have included tight tip on passes from forwards in a pod as “playing off nine” for the purposes of this article.
2: Kick Off Nine
This is where the scrumhalf takes the pace out of the game – usually – and box kicks up the field or off the field depending on the positional context.
3: Play Off Nine Xpanded
This is where the ball is played off nine as described above but it featured a specific strike move scheme or offload play as part of it.
4: Play Off 10
This is where the ball is moved to a player who is acting as a “first receiver” – usually the flyhalf, full-back or a midfielder but it doesn’t have to be – gets the ball from the ruck and looks to move the ball through a pass or a kick.
Every team has a rough idea – some teams have an exact idea – of how and where they will choose to use these ruck actions depending on where on the pitch they are. To understand the context, we have to first understand how teams break down the pitch. 1014 Rugby did an interesting feature on this recently enough but it’s a standard enough way for teams to structure their decisions making.
For shorthand, we’ll call box kicking and Playing Off Nine, as conservative options and Playing Off 10 and Playing Off Nine Xpanded as more expansive choices. Playing Off 10 isn’t always an expansive option – sometimes it’s just an exit – but for brevity’s sake, we’ll use that shorthand.
For the most part, if you have possession in your own 22, which we’ll call Q1 or the Red Zone, you’ll want to exit as quickly and as securely as possible. Not every team has this mentality in Q1 but Ireland and, for example, the Springboks, certainly do for the vast majority of scenarios.
Q2 – the Blue Zone – is from your own 22 to the halfway line and most top teams will tend to be more expansive in this area of the field, especially off the lineout, but that isn’t always a given. Munster under Rassie Erasmus, for example, would kick away a lot of possession in this area of the field to pressure the opposition’s kick reception and benefit off any inaccuracies with a high defensive press. South Africa play in a similar way under Erasmus at the moment.
Q3 – the Gold Zone – is where you see the majority of teams attacking flair and phase schemes. It’s also a dangerous set-piece position because any linebreak generally leads to a try or a serious attacking advantage in Q3.
Q4 – the Green Zone – is the opposition’s 22 and you’d generally expect most sides to actually get less expansive in this area as they try to pressure the opposition close to their own try line. The closer you get to the try line, the harder it is to play expansively because of try line helping the opposition’s line speed and simplifying their defensive decision making.
How have Ireland behaved on their rucks in the three World Cup games to date?
Over the entire three games, we can see the following combined trends.
Ireland Combined Ruck Decision Trends vs Scotland, Russia and Japan.
| Position Context | Play Off Nine | Kick Off Nine | Play Off Nine Xpanded | Play Off 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 | 6 | 11 | 0 | 6 |
| Q2 | 30 | 7 | 1 | 28 |
| Q3 | 67 | 2 | 4 | 35 |
| Q4 | 77 | 0 | 0 | 13 |
What does this show us? It shows us that Ireland plays mostly off of #9 regardless of where we are on the pitch – something we would have known – but that we are more likely to play off of #10 in Q3. What this chart doesn’t show is how Ireland have upped our willingness to put the ball through the hands in transition all over the field bar Q1.
These overall numbers stacks with our preferred sequence of strike move (either off set-piece, transition or phase) to set the position and then going for “expansive” options once the space presents itself for Sexton to exploit.
In individual games, there were the following notes;
- We Kicked Off #9 in Q1 vs Scotland more than in the Russian and Japanese games combined from all positions.
- We Kicked Off #9 six times from Q2 vs Scotland, more than in the Russian and Japanese games combined from all positions.
- Three of our tries against Scotland game from Play Off #9 in Q4.
- We had 51 attacking rucks in Q3 against Japan. The Scottish and Russian games combined had 53 Q3 ruck decisions.
- We Played Off #10 19 times in Q3 against Japan, the most amount of Plays Off #10 in any segment of any game to date.
- We scored two tries from Q2 against Russia by Playing Off #10.
If we work out the average over the three games, we see the following;
| Position Context | Play Off Nine | Kick Off Nine | Play Off Nine Xpanded | Play Off 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 | 2 | 3.6 | 0 | 2 |
| Q2 | 10 | 2.3 | 0.3 | 9.3 |
| Q3 | 22.3 | 0.6 | 1.3 | 11.6 |
| Q4 | 25.6 | 0 | 0 | 4.3 |
What do we see here? Confirmation of the previous numbers, obviously, just boiled down as if they were in one game. Two things strike me – we seem to be kicking less from Q2 in most cases, bar Scotland. This could be to preserve the energy of our outside backs rather than sending them on multiple box kick chases up the field in very difficult cardiovascular conditions or it could be a continuation of what we saw in preseason where we stuffed our kicking numbers ahead of the opening game against Scotland.
We kicked from #9 way more from Q1 and Q2 against Scotland than we did against Japan but they were probably the most favourable conditions we’ve played in from a humidity perspective. I definitely felt that we should have kicked more against Japan, and the numbers from that game certainly back that up when you see 37% of our 51 attacking ruck decisions in Q3 going through #10 without any reward on the scoreboard as the game developed. Against Scotland, for example, we had 22 attacking ruck decisions in Q3 and only put four of them through #10.
You can see our phase pressure game showing up big in our Play Off #9 stats in Q3 and Q4. Ireland have traditionally been really good at building pressure in and around Q3/Q4 under Schmidt and the same patterns are holding up here. I’m interested in how much we’re Playing Off #10 in Q2. That area of the field seems to be the next big area for attack to grow if we look at the game as a whole.
If you think about it, most defences are more likely to overcommit to aggressive defensive schemes in this part of the pitch and leave large gaps at the edges of their blitz and between their primary defensive line and backfield.
Have a look at the All Blacks numbers against South Africa if you want to get a look at where they (a) had most of their possessions and (b) how often they played off #10.
All Blacks Ruck Trends vs South Africa
| Position Context | Play Off Nine | Kick Off Nine | Play Off Nine Xpanded | Play Off 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 4 |
| Q2 | 7 | 10 | 3 | 18 |
| Q3 | 9 | 0 | 4 | 7 |
| Q4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
Eighteen Plays Off #10 in Q2? Ten box kicks? It makes sense when you consider how the Boks like to defend and the space between their primary line and backfield – something the All Blacks went after to excellent effect.
The key for Ireland against Samoa is to go back to the style that has worked for us. It really is about playing in the right areas but, crucially, it’s also about not overplaying in the right areas.
The Japan game was the perfect example.
Ireland Ruck Trends VS Japan
| Position Context | Play Off Nine | Kick Off Nine | Play Off Nine Xpanded | Play Off 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| Q2 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
| Q3 | 30 | 0 | 2 | 19 |
| Q4 | 30 | 0 | 0 | 6 |
Compare that game to our average above and keep in mind that we won the other two games comfortably with a bonus point. Does it look like we took too much out of the ball in Q3? Does it look like we lost our normal pattern? Maybe it also looks like we didn’t get the normal penalty rewards that this type of possession in Q3 would normally entail. It definitely looks like we weren’t accurate enough.
The ultimate lesson might well be that the best place to launch our attacks against Samoa is in Q3 but we’ll have to wait and see. Either way, I think the margins between Ireland reaching the level of November 2018 against the All Blacks are small enough. Our error rate in Q3/Q4 has been way above the level I would normally expect and that largely comes down to environmental conditions, in my opinion.
If we can get those under control and play a little smarter, we can play much closer to the performance that bent Scotland into submission than the frustrated, overheated frustration of the Japanese defeat.
The margins are smaller than you think.
