First things first. I needed a new name, and like Mrs. Slocombe, I am unanimous in my opinions, so Unanimous it is.
Last Tuesday I put up an article containing match margin charts that showed the Wallabies under Eddie Jones typically getting off to a good start. Their average margin typically peaked at +5 points at the 13 minutes point, before entering a steady decline to finish with an average loosing margin of 18 points.
Eloise commented that one possibility to explain this, was that Eddie had a reputation for giving his teams “20 Scripted Plays” to get the team into the lead, and from then on things were less planned. A corollary of this would be that the Wallabies can carry out Eddie’s scripted plays, but are not yet good at improvising or playing under a less scripted regime.
I decided to see what Eddie’s starts were like in his previous terms as head coach. The following is the chart.
The yellow line is the average match margin of Eddie coaching the Wallabies in 2023. This is the line from last week that shows the peak at 13 minutes.
The grey line is an average of a set of 5 matches England played in 2022. The set of 5 was chosen to have as similar opponents as the Wallabies faced in the yellow line. The matches producing the grey line were against France, Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, and South Africa. The average loss against these mostly highly ranked opponents was only 5 points. It doesn’t seem a sack-worthy result.
The red line is England in the 2019 World Cup, but excluding the USA match to make it 5 matches too. This set of opponents was Tonga, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. The England – France match in the 2019 world was cancelled due to Typhoon Hagibis.
It seems that the starts for Eddie’s England were slow on average. The red and grey lines generally trend in one direction, with mostly minor ups and downs, but the starts appear to be about as slow as any other 15 to 20 minutes periods. The best part of his England matches was the last 8 minutes.
Perhaps Eddie realised his scripted plays were slightly counter productive, and he stopped doing it. Or maybe the scripted plays were not for the first 15 or 20 minutes, but for later in the game. It’s also possible he tried doing this between 2019 and 2022, but wasn’t doing it at the 2019 World Cup or in his last year for England.
Whatever the case, it seems that the explanation that best fits the data is that a key group of the Wallabies players (probably the bigger forwards) don’t have enough stamina for the team to keep playing at their best. Once they loose their initial freshness, the team gets progressively worse.
Eddie commented in recent days, that he thought the Springboks 7-1 bench was a good idea, and even floated the idea of an 8-0 bench. I’m not sure what you’d do with an early injury to a back with an 8-0 bench, but 7-1 might be workable as the Springboks showed. Probably 2 “injury” replacements (one a forward, and one a back) and then 6 forwards as finishers. That leaves two forwards to play at least mostly through the match. You’d guess two back rowers if you’re trying to keep as much fresh mass on the field as possible, and Eddie seems into heavy players at the moment.
