Good defence isn’t just about how many tackles you make or miss.
Making or missing tackles plays a part, obviously, but for me, the biggest part of the defensive game in 2019 is the tackle you aren’t even a position to make or miss. In that regard, the most crucial part of any rugby team’s defence is their front five. They are the players who will, more often than not, be defending the middle of the field and the area closest to the ruck point.
The All Blacks head coach Steve Hansen gave a small clue regarding this in his explanation for leaving Owen Franks out of his 31 man squad for the World Cup.
Big, mobile number ones and threes. But what do mobile props have to do with defence? And what does this have to do with Scotland?
Bear with me, I’m getting to that. First, we need to break out some graphics. Below is an ideal front five defensive alignment on a centre-field ruck position.
“T” is the player making the tackle and out of the game in this instance. “R” is the ruck itself.We want our big defensive front five leader – James Ryan is a good example from an Irish context – in a position to make a tackle on the “openside” of this central ruck so #5 is in a good spot here. Our biggest, heaviest guys are in the middle of the field where they can match up with their opposite numbers and, crucially, avoid being isolated in the wider areas where quicker, more agile players can attack their size and skate right past them.
The back row and midfield slot into place around our front five and build our primary line. Ideally, heavy lads stay close to the ruck while the more athletic players fan out towards the edges of the defensive line.
I’ve highlighted our tight five in red to show how everything gets built around their positioning. When Hansen spoke about the need for “big, mobile ones and threes” he was talking about the core problem that faces most top-level teams when it comes to their props and that is finding the balance between elite scrummaging ability, elite lineout lifting/mauling, heavy ball carrying, defensive stopping power AND an ability to fill space laterally. That final quality comes into play on defensive sets in the aftermath of a set-piece, multi-phase defensive sets and increasingly on kick transitions.
Only very special props will have five qualities to the highest level. Most will have three, maybe four of those qualities. The likes of Mako Vunipola and Tadhg Furlong have all five of those key qualities to an elite level, in my opinion. Owen Franks has three of them at this stage in his career, in my opinion. Lock forwards get assessed in a similar vein but with some variations like lineout jumping and/or tactical awareness. But why are these criteria important for Scotland?
They have a problem in their tight five.
In the last two Six Nations championships, Scotland have been consistently in the bottom two for tries conceded – no prizes for who’s always bottom of that table – and would have finished with the lowest amount of tries scored for the last two years had it not been for five second-half tries against England on the last day of this year’s championship.
I think both of those numbers are mostly down to their tight five.
Now, when I write “tight five” here, that doesn’t always have to refer to numbers 1-5 literally. Munster, for example, have a system for our Category 1 team that puts Kilcoyne, Scannell, Ryan, Kleyn and Stander as our “tight five” with Tadhg Beirne defending like a back row depending on who’s playing openside. But I think you have to have five big, physical dominant forwards defending the close range spaces with your “back row” and centres filling the gaps around them as required depending on the situation. Scotland have two outstanding flankers – Watson and Barclay – but lack that third ingredient in the back row and, in my opinion, don’t have a heavy hitting defender in midfield. That means that, all too often, Scotland end up scrambling in defence, especially when their tight forwards get dragged out of position.
If you see tight five forwards defending edge spaces, then something has gone wrong – usually that they took too long to get up and down after a tackle situation or they didn’t track the opposition’s ruck position well enough. A “good track” sees your tight five moving a lot across the field as they keep pace with the opposition’s phase play. A “bad track” sees them stick to one area of the field or gamble wrongly as to where the opposition pattern is taking them.
Townsend tries to select the biggest tight five possible to help Scotland’s offensive game but any collective selection he makes doesn’t have the ball carrying, defensive stopping power or lateral movement they need to plug the holes that consistently show up.
If we take Scotland’s starting pack in a Category 1 game, I think you’re looking at the following team and I’m listing who I would class as their tight five defenders in bold.
- Allan Dell
- Stuart McInally
- WP Nel
- Johnny Gray
- Ben Toolis
- John Barclay
- Hamish Watson
- ??
I think their #8 spot is still up for grabs here because Townsend has some tough decisions to make. Barclay and Watson are no brainers to start for Scotland when they’re both fit but that #8 decision is tough. Do you go for Strauss, who can act as a heavy defender? Or do you go with Thomson or Bradbury, both of whom I wouldn’t class as “tight five” defenders?
That’s the dilemma. McInally is Scotland’s best hooker but he’s not a tight defender, in my opinion.
That’s the dilemma for Townsend from a defensive POV. Who are his primary tight defenders? And what are their qualities? Because I think Scotland are short of top quality athletes here and it’s killing them.
For example, what do you notice from this phase which, for context, is two phases after a Scottish kick exit?
Keep that in your mind.
Let’s go back to right before this ball came out of the ruck.
Scotland’s flankers for this game – Ritchie and Barclay – are out of the game and Carmichael gets swallowed up while competing at the breakdown.
When the ball comes out, Scotland are defending the openside with FOUR tight forwards. Ben Toolis is the pillar defender, Stuart McInally is the B defender, Simon Berghan is the C defender and then Josh Strauss and Zander Fagerson are the next forwards in the line. Fagerson is defending furthest out from ruck.
France will be disgusted that they didn’t get at least a linebreak from this movement. Let’s look at the GIF run through again.
Notice anything else?
The speed on the inside of the break isn’t what it needs to be.
Scotland are badly unbalanced on this phase, their tight five are tracking poorly and their badly structured realignment on kick transition is something that Schmidt will have noticed – it was a consistent factor over both games against France.
Look at how the exact same situation – a phase in the aftermath of a Scottish kick exit – hurt Scotland just a few minutes after the above example.
Their tight five alignment is better here but look at how slow they fill the space after the ruck!
When France cut back to attack the space, Scotland have spaces everywhere. Matt Fagerson gets the missed tackle stat here, but it’s the tight five defenders who aren’t in a position to get a hand on the breaking player are the real issue.
You can see how much space Penaud had to attack when we look from behind the posts. Even Strauss is up against it to make this tackle, given the space he has to defend.
Here’s another example. This is a fairly rudimentary defensive set (one phase in the aftermath of a kick back from Scotland) on the French 22 but you can see the instant separation that develops between WP Nel, George Turner and Gordon Reid from Scotland’s midfield. Watch the space that 1, 2 and 3 end up covering.
That is another sign of a tight five that is too easily unbalanced. Blade Thomson and Hamish Watson track across to make the save on Guitoune – a powerful, pacey strike runner – but France make a good break that they could really have worked with if they hadn’t lost possession soon after.
That example – of Scotland’s back row having to work incredibly hard to track breaks – is a constant for Townsend’s men. Here’s another example – again off a kick transition;
One pass from the base of the ruck took out Scotland’s tight five defence completely and set up an attackable isolation for the French midfield to chase.
The edge space that Wilson had to defend in this instance was almost impossible to do without conceding massive ground and in the end, France took their try handily enough. Maitland and Horne have to step up on the two edge attackers, leaving Wilson to defend two players in 20m of space.
It ends predictably enough once Guitoune breaks into the space.
So what does this mean?
It means that whatever version of their tight five Scotland field, they will have the same weaknesses – the aftermath of kick transition. Their midfield is relatively small and has to worry about the power of a midfield runner like Henshaw, Farrell or Aki. That means that their back row is overworked to compensate for the spaces left by their tight five and midfield – Hamish Watson completed 20.5% of all the tackles attempted by Scottish forwards last weekend, for example. That isn’t to say that the Scottish midfield doesn’t make tackles – they do – it’s just that in the aftermath of kick transition events, they’re often trapped by the ruck.
Kick transition events are lethal to Scotland because of the lack of mobility in their front five and they’ve shown it again and again against France in the last two games and, indeed, for much of the Six Nations.
So ask yourself this; why do you think we haven’t seen one offensive box kick from Ireland so far against Italy and England, even when it would make sense to do it?
That isn’t to say we won’t see box kicks against Wales but we have been avoiding that strategy for a reason. Really makes you think though, doesn’t it?
