Who cares about our attack I say. Schmidt's winning us games on the back of a collosal injury crisis including back to back French wins and SH clean sweeps. That is enormous considering our rugby history.
I would argue our defence is arguably the best around right now, possibly our breakdown nuisance too. These are our strengths and we play them superbly. We're averaging 3 tries a game too, although this may be skewed by Georgia and Italy games.
If we get more of a run together with less injuries maybe the flashy stuff will come along then.
Ayup. Schmidt was known for the offloading when at Leinster, but he was working with those guys day-in and day-out. In this case he's just getting four Lions back from injury (and one of them just took a knee to the spine), he has two centers with only a handful of games together (as opposed to Drico and D'Arcy's psychic link from years of training together), and he doesn't have these players on a daily basis like he had Leinster. He's used that situation to build depth and have them just focus on the systems, which helps to develop some confidence (because they keep winning).
I don't think they're one-dimensional. We've seen flash from them before, and it's not like those same players just forgot what they were doing. It'll just take more than two games against enormously physical packs before things start to gel.
But that defense -- they can do a lot with that alone. Only one kick from hand didn't go just as Sexton planned, and most kicks had a chase on them before the ball came close to landing. That kind of pressure will and does result in errors and penalties. And then there's this kind of clean-out from O'Brien, where he runs five meters back to enter through the gate and takes Kockott, le Roux and Dussatoir two meters out of the ruck on his own:
