If we were to talk about specific players in yesterday’s Melbourne test it would be a short article! There was so much said last week about how this is a situation where the French are their most dangerous – having been so bad last week, they often will pull out a great performance the next. So much so that maybe the Wallabies were determined not to risk losing. 
Quality attack invariably requires you to risk failure – not necessarily defeat, but for attack to be successful against a quality defence you’ve got to threaten it at the line of the contact. So almost by definition this can come unstuck. However, quality attack recognises that for the defence to be under pressure, the attack needs to be under pressure as well. Effective technique can minimise the downsides of the failure.
As a prospective receiver, as I approach the tackle line I need to change my body position and angle of run ever so slightly, so that I’m taking the ball into my body and presenting an outside shoulder to the defence and coming just slightly to his inside shoulder. That way I do cut out the possibility of passing the ball to my outside man, but I’ve already lost that ability by being on the tackle line.
What I have done is maximise my ability to catch and perhaps transfer the ball. It gives me the opportunity to brush the tackle on the tackler’s inside shoulder, continue the run, or take the tackle and pass back to the ball passer or another player on a good line (just like Palu to Slipper for Folau’s try in Brisbane).
For a ball carry to threaten the defence the ball carrier needs to be applying threats that are obvious to the defence as well as some that aren’t. What you don’t want is that those options that are so obvious too early in the play so that the defence can nullify them all. So as the ball carrier comes into the tackle area you want different possibilities to immediately come into play: say one guy is running across the field with a support player on his outside who has adjusted his line or slowed his run so that he’s now a fair bit deeper than the ball carrier so an inside line becomes a possibility to him.
At the same time if the next player outside the ball carrier has flattened his line so that a flat pass hitting him on the outside will put him in a hole. At the same time you also keep up your sleeve the the possibility that the man who stayed deeper and could have taken the inside line, now takes the outside line with the ball carrier straightening and putting this man outside of him through with the short pass (that classic Larkham ploy where suddenly he would be in space because the defence has fallen for the runners on either side of him).
We need bodies in motion – and that’s important – but it needs to be bodies in motion that can also change their line instinctively, thus presenting a number of possibilities to the defence. At the last minute we need these possibilities to become clear – slowing the defence’s thought processes down with panic.
As the attack you won’t always take the option that gives you the best outcome, but if you keep trying, eventually you will. It didn’t seem to me that we threw any of these types of plays at the opposition.They were almost always one out runners, or maybe three runners all parallel to touch for the passer to hit one. These are easy threats to counter. We seemed intent on doing this over and over, without adding any of the threats to put enough pressure on the defence.
This doesn’t have to be done with backs – for anyone who saw the South Africa v. Wales match, early in the game South Africa had a lineout out close to the Welsh try line (see the video below). Australia would have caught the ball and driven to the line. The South Africans took the ball, made to drive, shifted it infield a few metres and then two or three runners drove in to move the ball on. The ball then came back to the original feinted line and one of the big South African back rows went over. Much like our try in the 91 RWC final.
http://youtu.be/4N35qOwkPRA?t=1m8s
It seemed to me that we’ve gone right away from that attitude. Making space for people is an extension of this – by virtue of a concentrated attack, to try and bring as many defenders as possible into a concentrated area and then move the ball away to where the defenders aren’t.
One of the ways to do this is with more than ruck ball. Defenders have no need to defend against the ball when it’s on the ground – none of them have to go to ground to defend it. The way to avoid this is stay on your feet and keep the play going to the try line by effecting an offload or mini-maul, causing a threat that forces the opposition to put people around the ball.
The downside is being caught off the ground. It’s a risk, but it’s that concentration of players with ball transfers and leg drive which is something we only ever did in the most obvious situation – the lineout. Therefore we couldn’t get through a determined tackling group. That group may not have been a good defensive group – but they didn’t need to be – they only needed to tackle.
We didn’t cause any real questions to be asked. We were direct, which was good, but we need more than that. The overlay on top of that – people in motion changing lines and angles, coming on support lines – is what will threaten you. France actually had more of that than the Wallabies, but we could handle it.
Looking at two different games and trying to compare them can be misleading, but I though the quality of the England v. New Zealand game was up another notch of quality. I watched the Wallaby game second and I thought I wasn’t sure we would have beaten either. It seemed to me that we recognised the French could play a lot better than they did in Brisbane and our response was to go entirely into our shell.
It was a shame, but when things are not going as well as you’d like, you’ve still got to win and I don’t find the explanation that sometimes you have to win ugly as acceptable. Certainly you want to win, but winning well points to the opportunities to do better and continue to win. Winning ugly means you’ve won that game but haven’t learnt anything more about winning other games. There have been great signs in other recent Wallabies matches, but not with this conservative approach.
