Rugby World Cup: Fortune Favours the French, Destiny Favours the All Blacks
Gareth Knight reviews the World Cup semi finals.
17 Oct 2011, 19:30
The tackle that lost it
It couldn’t have been a more glorious defeat for Wales, and the team that has played so well now has to play a third place match while the team that has revelled in their own disorganisation goes into the World Cup Final. Many Welsh supporters and no end of neutrals are blaming Irish referee Alain Rolland for destroying the game by sending off Sam Warburton, but this is not the way to analyse the game. Yes it is true that Wales would have won had Warburton been given a yellow card and not a red card, but it’s also the case that Wales would have won had just one of their missed penalties gone over, had they converted the try, had they taken the drop goal opportunity when it was presented and had Adam Jones not been taken off after 5 minutes with an injury. Rugby is a sport where you pick up injuries, where you pick up the odd bad decision and where you miss kicks but the team that wins is the team that adapts to these circumstances quickly; blaming the referee when it goes against you is not an attitude that rugby players and supporters should adopt and attacking the referee for bias, questioning his professionalism is even more disgraceful than any bad decision can be – leave that to football. Let’s not forget that Wales were awarded a penalty that should have been awarded to France – had Wales kicked the penalty over, it would be France that would be demanding Rolland be marched to the guillotine.
The refereeing decision was, technically, the correct one and we have to remember why referees and the IRB are so strict about anything they consider to be a dangerous ‘spear tackle’. Just six years ago the world of refereeing changed when this happened. That spear tackle, which is clearly in another league compared to what Warburton did, went unpunished during and after the match and turned what should have been a nail bitingly close Lions Tour into a Kiwi rout. To this day many of us have still not forgiven the All Blacks for deploying such disgraceful tactics, and it was we British and Irish rugby supporters who demanded a crackdown. I agree with all the pundits that in the circumstances of the game – 20 minutes in to a World Cup semi final, a first offence, an unintentional tackle and one that the player did all he could to rectify in the split second he had, should have warranted some degree of leniency. This was not a tackle remotely on a par with the O’Driscoll spear tackle (watch the two side by side and you’ll see what I mean), but the basic principle was the same. In my view the referee should have sent Warburton to the sin bin, awarded France a penalty (which they’d have scored from) and the IRB would subsequently suspend Warburton for 3 weeks. Had Warburton so much as blinked at the referee for the rest of the game he’d have been sent off. But once that decision was made, Wales did the right thing and played a game that gave them every chance of winning.
It is reckoned that a sin bin costs a team an average of 10 points, so losing a player for 60 minutes should constitute a 60 point deficit. The mere fact that Wales outplayed France for the rest of the game says it all about how far Wales have come as a team and how great their potential is.
Adam Jones’s injury just five minutes into the match was the first message Wales had that this was not going to be quite as easy as it should have been. At the very first scrum it was clear that Wales were going to dominate on the tighthead side and the moment Jones was sent off things started to go wrong – the scrum was far weaker, the lineout had lost its precision and the breakdown play was not what it was. It was by no means a situation that gave France the edge, but it took a lot out of the Welsh game. You cannot lose the best tighthead in world rugby and expect to play the same game.
Then we come to missed kicks. If you play a classic northern hemisphere game, the kind of game Scotland and England have traditionally excelled at, where you grind out victories by forcing your opponents to concede penalties, you have to be able to convert those penalties into points. England won a World Cup eight years ago doing just that and we saw in the Argentina game just what happens when you fail to convert. A top class kicker will score 70-75% of his kicks, so a penalty is worth around 2.1 points on average, but if that rate drops due to the weather, the air circulation in the stadium, the ball, the slipperiness of the grass or even the kicker having a bit of mud on the top of his boots, it becomes vital that the team adapts its strategy. On average just one in ten five-meter lineouts results in a try, that means each lineout is worth 0.5 points on average (if unconverted). So if a team with a strong lineout and clear forward dominance is missing kicks, they should rapidly realise this and go for the lineout because even though the try scoring opportunity is not guaranteed, it may still be mathematically better value that kicking and, critically, lineouts open up drop goal opportunities in front of the post. There’s an argument that says that even if your kicking rate is under 60%, providing your own lineout rate is 75% or higher, you’re always best going for the lineout, attempting a try but taking the drop goal at the first opportunity. Wales failed to kick their points – had just one gone over, they’d now be in the final.
That brings us on to the missed drop goal opportunity. Drop goals win matches – just ask Jonny Wilkinson, Jeremy Guscott, Rob Andrew, Joel Stransky and Stephen Larkham, all of whom scored drop goals to win major matches. This World Cup has seen nervousness on the part of kickers to go for drop goals, probably because drop goals are naturally far harder to execute that kicks from the tee and if kicks from the tee are going everywhere but between the uprights you’d be forgiven for presuming drop goals will be even harder. In the semi final Wales had drop goal opportunities and failed to take them, on one occasion the opportunity couldn’t have been better – it was clear they were not moving forward with each phase of play and they were just outside the 22 in the middle of the field.
Wales deserved to win the match and had there been 15 players on the field, had Adam Jones not been sent off, had their kicking decisions and accuracy been on I think they’d have won comfortably. It’s a huge credit to Wales that they were even in shouting distance of France and they can all hold their heads up high, but they still didn’t win. Rugby isn’t always about which team deserves it, it’s about which team gets it, and that’s what wins World Cups. Imagine if you were a French rugby fan in 2003 – France played by far the best rugby of that tournament yet when they came up against England in the mud in the semi final it was England that capitalised – they adapted to the conditions and the team that should have lost to Wales in the quarter final found themselves beating France and they went on to win the trophy. Imagine you were a Springbok in 2009 – after 12 years of hurt you’ve already taken a series win playing two of the greatest rugby matches of all time and you can now deal the killer blow to the Lions in the final test, yet the Lions came out with a confidence, pride and level of anger that allowed them to reach even greater heights than before. People like me who have watched with disbelief as Wales played such amazing rugby and refused to collapse are immensely disappointed but I hope the players are angry – we need a sporting mentality that wants to win because there’s no denying that wanting it makes it more likely that you’ll get it.
Wales are not out of the tournament – they still have one game to play against Australia on Friday and while this is seen as a friendly, I hope Wales take it to them. Wales need a win against a Tri Nations side to prove just how good they are and their players need to start thinking ahead as to how they can use their experience of the World Cup not as a career highlight but as something that enables them to get even better in due course.
France go into the final as the luckiest team ever to reach that position. Let’s not forget that they lost two group games against the All Blacks and Tonga, they qualified for the quarter final only because Canada beat Tonga and they made it to the semi final only because England were even more disorganised than they were. Are they the second best team in world rugby? Absolutely nowhere near. Should we write France off? No.
Australia 6, New Zealand 20
The moment Quade Cooper kicked the ball straight into touch at the kick off was the moment it became clear which team had the psychological edge. New Zealand could have fallen apart under the pressure but they dominated the game in every regard. And therein lies the problem for the All Blacks – they still only scored 20 points. Australia is not a team renowned for their defence yet this looked like a Six Nations match – low scoring, defensive, grinding.
New Zealand have often looked like the kind of team that is always a danger with the ball but a team that often fails to secure the ball often enough but this time they were a team that couldn’t give the ball away. The All Blacks were somewhat fortunate to have momentum on their side – it was the Wallabies that looked over-awed by the occasion making silly errors and they never really presented the All Blacks with the kind of challenge we expected (something I feel South Africa would have done had they got through to the semi final).
The game was one of those extremely rare instances of momentum and a sense of destiny carrying the team to victory – you just never thought they looked like losing. While this ‘momentum and destiny’ is often followed by defeat (ask Ireland and Wales about their respective momentums and destinies in this tournament) New Zealand seemed to revel in it.
If there was a clear problem in the Kiwi game it was kicking and as we saw in the other semi final, that is not a problem to be taken lightly.
Comments (1)
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Good article (except Adam Jones was injured, not sent off).
We (Wales) lost because we didn't take the chances we had to win - just like in the South Africa game.
Yes the red card was unfair, but a truely great international team would have put at least one of those missed kicks over. Remember it was France's second choice kicker who put their penalties away.
I hope the All Blacks stuff the French in the final though. Up against 14 men for 60 minutes the French looked very poor.
18/10/2011 10:05