Every single time you walk past that white line on the side of the pitch, you risk getting injured. It’s the deal every player makes. You get to do some cool shit, get paid and play the game you love – or at least really like – at the highest level in front of ever-increasing crowds but the spectre of injury is always there. How many weeks will the Injury God demand as tribute?
If you’re lucky, a few weeks or a month or two every season. If you’re unlucky, he’ll give you an ACL injury and watch you rehab it for the guts of a year. If he’s particularly spiteful, however, the Injury God will take two months from you at the worst possible time.
On Saturday afternoon, the Injury God whispered into Alun Wyn Jones ear at a fairly non-descript ruck and said, “bad luck skip.” A dislocated shoulder. Bang. It could happen at any time and, indeed, happens fairly often in this game but it seems particularly cruel to deny a man of the stature of Alun Wyn Jones from returning to tour South Africa as captain 12 years after getting his start for the Lions against the same opponent.
Life isn’t fair, sport less so again but I’ll curse the Injury God a little longer this evening for that one. The game moves on though, even when injury snatches a guy like Alun Wyn Jones away from the tour. How the Lions reconstruct their front five and pack in the aftermath remains to be seen but it didn’t have much of an effect on the winning and losing of this game.
***
If Japan were anyone else, they’d have been accused of “flattering to deceive” in the aftermath of this game. Jamie Joseph has a claim to be the most influential coach in the modern game but I found much of Japan’s work here to be pretty inefficient highlight-reel fodder with very little in the way of actual end-product.
This, for example, was a perfect example of the kind of play that will show up in slow motion replays as excellent handling and Rugby Being Played The Right Way™. But despite the nice passing and running lines, it ultimately only produced a 6m gain on the edge of the defensive line on the first phase – a poor return for a play seemingly designed to hit the edge – and didn’t pull the kind of defensive compression it would have wanted on the second phase. As a result, the scheme pushed the skill threshold of the players too far and the move broke down in the wider channels.
For Japan’s intricate strike plays and phase schemes to work, their execution needs to be perfect. When even the smallest thing goes off – a pass going off or adding fat to the play – or, say, the defence doesn’t overcommit on any one player’s line until the ball moves to the edge of the pitch.
The first mistake that teams make with Japan is buying into the primary aim of their system, which looks to play around a lack of size by extending where they hit the line. Everything Japan do is designed to play around their lack of tight collision winners by creating number mismatches on the edge through the accuracy and tight line running of their pack in tandem with their handling backs. When it’s done well, it allows you to outpace and unbalance a bigger opponent even if you aren’t getting over the gain line in the central collisions.
What breaks this system? A defending side who commit to one man stops where possible, who only ever attack the most obvious poaching opportunities, who stay tight in central areas and push out onto your wide passes and who stay active on your running lines until the last second will cause a 3-2-X system a lot of trouble.
In this instance, the Lions used their stopping power to force the Japanese to burn numbers at the ruck while we filed across the point of the ruck. When Japan got to a wide ruck position, the Lions kept that narrow stack, ensured that they didn’t put two men on the tight Japanese running lines in the first pod of three because of their willingness to tip on and screen pass. This puts an onus on winning your collisions one on one but the baked-in size advantage made this very doable. The narrow stack of active Lions defenders put a lot of space out wide which seems like a mistake against Japan but when they slung the ball wide to find the space, it was the cue for the tight edge of the Lions defence to push out towards the winger who just had to hold the position until he met the Japanese runner.
You see this over and over again during the game on Japan’s offensive sets.
Japan looked most dangerous when these principles were broken. Here, for example, Henderson drifted off his man, put in a double tackle with Beirne that took both of them out while Japan offloaded, Biggar tugged in on the tackle, which put pressure on Jones to slow the ball while the system recovered.
Japan went wide here but thankfully, from a Lions POV, the ball didn’t move beyond the edge and we were able to choke up the runner.
The depth the Lions kept from the Japanese ruck was pretty cool too, actually. It completely took away the threat of offside penalties that can be produced by the pace of the Japanese ruck ball – due to a general lack of breakdown contesting – and it also depowered the breaking ability of their scrumhalf Kaito Shigeno, which the 3-2-X system uses to tug defenders off their lines and create those mismatches elsewhere.
So if it seemed that Japan had a lot of ball and a lot of seemingly dynamic possession that didn’t really have much of an impact on the Lions 22 until the last 10 minutes, it’s due in part to this defensive system deployed by Steve Tandy. I have to say that the cruel miserablist in me thoroughly enjoyed Japan’s try coming off the back of a close-range maul but I’m yet to be convinced on how relevant the challenges in this game will be in the context of the challenge that will be posed by the Springboks.
It was a decent game in and of itself, mind, that the Lions won mostly off the back of a strong maul, a really effective scrum and some encouraging attacking structure, which I will look at later in the week in the GIF Room.
The real challenge – the attrition of the tour and the hard bubble within it – begins now.
Notable Players
I was surprised, yet again, to see Conor Murray come in for a bit of criticism after this game. I’m quite used to it at this stage and I mean, he probably is too. Murray is one of Ireland’s most decorated and most underrated player by some distance. There is the Conor Murray people think they see – which I believe is mostly influenced by a general misunderstanding of the box kick, which is a big part of his game – and then there is the Conor Murray that exists in reality who has been one of the first names on the teamsheet for Ireland when fit for the last 10 years and the only player in this British & Irish Dream Team who Warren Gatland thinks is guaranteed to start the tests if he’s fit.
That’s why he’s been made Lions captain in the absence of Alun Wyn Jones. That isn’t to say he had a perfect, flawless game here. He had two poor kicks in this game and one poorly judged snipe that lead to a turnover but everything else was cool, calm quality.
Watch this sequence of possession that I clipped from midway through the first half. There wasn’t any significance to it, I just wanted to get a random sampling of what Murray is like phase for phase. Watch the accuracy of Murray’s passing off left and right side. Look at how many times the runner has to adjust his body shape to take the pass in stride. Look at the consistent pace on the ball, the consistent cadence, the variety of his pod targets.
Conor Murray is just really, really good at what he does, even when he’s not running in tries himself which is the usual metric for good scrumhalf play these days. His willingness to take on territorial kicking regularly is a massive part of his game too. If he wanted to just coast on looking better to the casual punter, he’d designate most of the kicking to his flyhalf. The team would be worse off, as would his flyhalf, but the criticism of him would evaporate overnight. That’s not his game, though. Part of the reason why he’s consistently selected by some of the best coaches in the game is that willingness to take on a strategic load that not every scrumhalf is capable of doing.
Murray had two direct assists during the game. This was one of them. Look for the key principles again – accuracy of the pass, the pace of pass in the context of position and the value added to the pass by the action of the scrumhalf.
That little step that Murray adds before the pass to Adams preserves the one on one isolation for the winger, who finished the opportunity like the world-class operator that he is. Murray’s baseline game is so good that he can coast through a game like this without hammering the pedal to the floor and still have consistent quality output.
Equally, I thought Dan Biggar had a really smooth, efficient game at #10. He’s one of those players that don’t really make mistakes and this game was a good illustration of that. He ran through his progressions, kept a team of guys lacking cohesion running onto decent possession and pulled out a few casually top-class passes too.
This was the kind of performance that had the confidence of “I’m the starting #10” written all over it. Biggar never has to overplay because he knows exactly what he’s world-class at and doesn’t try to sprinkle in some of the stuff he’s average at for the sake of pleasing everyone. Smooth.
My top performer in this game was from a guy in the pack who I think went a long way to nailing down his spot in the test team today. Jack Conan. I think Conan has often been miscast, especially at test level, where he has usually been rotated into the role usually occupied by CJ Stander. Both players would then be tossed about being compared to each other in endlessly boring “who’s better” style arguments that ignored the differences in how they play and mostly, how best to utilize their strengths and hide their weaknesses.
When you use Jack Conan as a power forward type player, I think that he has a tendency to fall out of games. That, for me, is not the best use of his skill set. I want to see Jack Conan as a wider carrier, a hitter off the set-piece, an occasional central reset carrier and a heavy wider presence on defence. He’s a heavy wing forward, in my opinion, and when you use him like that he looks, well, like a test Lion.
He won a tonne of turnovers here, which really helped stem any initial Japanese momentum, and looked threatening on his carries, especially when he tracked out to the wider spaces as a component of that edge two-pod.
He looked effective at the offensive breakdown on my watch throughs and filled gaps out wide in defence, which was needed regularly against Japan’s playstyle. He kept working the entire game, even when the ball didn’t flow his way later in the second half.
This was the kind of performance that could easily see Conan starting against the Springboks next month without it being even close to a shock. Exactly what he needed to start the tour off strong. ★★★★★
The Wally Ratings: Japan (H)
The Wally Ratings explainer page is here.
Players are rated based on their time on the pitch, if they were playing notably out of position, and on the overall curve of the team performance. DNP means the player did not feature and N/A means they weren’t on the pitch long enough to warrant a fair rating.
| Names | Rating |
|---|---|
| Rory Sutherland | ★★★ |
| Ken Owens | ★★★ |
| Tadhg Furlong | ★★★ |
| Iain Henderson | ★★★★ |
| Alun Wyn Jones | N/A |
| Tadhg Beirne | ★★★★ |
| Justin Tipuric | N/A |
| Jack Conan | ★★★★★ |
| Conor Murray | ★★★★ |
| Dan Biggar | ★★★★ |
| Duhan Van Der Merwe | ★★★ |
| Bundee Aki | ★★★ |
| Robbie Henshaw | ★★★★ |
| Josh Adams | ★★★★ |
| Liam Williams | ★★★ |
| Jamie George | ★★★ |
| Kyle Sinkler | ★★★★ |
| Courtney Lawes | ★★★★ |
| Taulupe Faletau | ★★ |
| Ali Price | ★★★ |
| Owen Farrell | ★★★ |
| Anthony Watson | ★★★ |
