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It's the recrimination I don't need … | Oct 08, 2007 09:19

SOME FOREIGN FIELD A Rugby World Cup blog

I was on my bike, literally, by the time the post-match interviews were underway. It was a lovely morning, and the streets were quiet between home and Coyle Park, the green area at the point of Point Chevalier. Just the odd glum driver trundling home, those silver fern flags fluttering pointlessly from the windows.

I pulled up at the park and sat on one of the benches, overlooking the harbour for a few minutes. The tide was low, but the water shimmered in the sunshine and the breeze was light. What a nice place to live, I thought.

On return, I cooked a brunch of free-range bacon, breakfast sausages, poached eggs, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms and lekkerbrot bread with Rocket Fuel sauce while I listened to Finlay Macdonald and Bill Ralston (who make a great team, by the way) insist they wouldn't mention the rugby on Radio Live, then raise it with every guest. To make it worse, the album of the week -- selected by Finlay's usual host Andrew Patterson before he went on holiday -- was James Blunt. It was actually funny.

So was the scene at St Lukes mall a couple of hours later, when I dropped to kids off at the movies. People -- men especially -- were wandering about distractedly, hoping that a little commerce night change the subject.

Throughout out the day, I argued the toss and commiserated with the regulars in our World Cup blog about what had happened. My philosophical mood rather eroded as I watched clips of the critical incidents.

I checked the readers' comment sections on the Stuff and Herald sites, and was additionally depressed by the bile, recrimination and hacking at tall poppies. Some New Zealanders are really ghastly at times like this.

It is only a game. But what exactly did happen? We've all heard the theories:

The Rotation Policy

Maybe, in the case of the midfield, where playing a fine fullback at centre again proved a fateful decision. It might all have been different if Conrad Smith had been playing all year; or if Tana Umaga had hung on for the World Cup. But the core of the team wasn't in doubt, and the All Blacks have come into late-season tours in Europe and monstered the opposition with anyone the coaches cared to put on the field. But in a wider sense, yes: everything about our rugby was sacrificed to the World Cup and it didn't work.

The All Blacks were "arrogant"

Easy to type, but what does it mean? That they thought they'd stroll to victory? I don't think so. You can't help being overwhelming favourites. Everyone thought so, including the Australian who dropped five million dollars with the bookies yesterday. If anything, they struggled to carry the burden of expectation.

The All Blacks played like showponies and you can't do that and win the big ones

Eh? The All Black tight forwards were magnificent and Ali Williams had his best game for his country. They dominated the set-pieces and had nearly three quarters of the possession. Indeed, you had to wish they had thrown it around a bit more. I can't recall seeing an All Black team so shy of instinct.

But one thing occurs to me in light of this: does the All Blacks "private shrink" Gilbert Enoka ever have a performance review? You have to wonder ...

The All Blacks didn't have a Plan B

Yep, they did. They just carried it out so grimly and mechanically that it became the problem. How many times have we armchair coaches urged them to tighten it up, hang on to the ball and win ugly? They did what they had discussed doing while they were a man down: kept the ball close, soaked up time. It didn't work. I think the captain has to accept some responsibility for allowing that to drag on.

Injuries

Was Dan Carter 100% fit when he took the field? At any rate, he was below his best. Losing his replacement, Nick Evans, to an injury shortly afterwards, was really foul luck. And losing Jerry Collins perhaps hurt more than anything else. Yes, the French lost Bentsen, but a deal with the Devil that kept them both on the field would have been just fine with me.

The French defended brilliantly

And how. The French made 176 tackles compared to the All Blacks' 36. That's a barely credible statistic, but apparently it happened. I still don't understand how they could do that much defending -- and so effectively slow down the All Black ball -- and concede only two penalties in the entire match (and none in the second half). Indeed, there were a whole suite of penalties that might have been awarded in this last-gasp incident on the French line. Which brings us to …

The Referee

I know Paddy O'Brien's told us all to grow up, but I can't see the point in being all staunch and insisting Wayne Barnes' performance didn't have a significant impact on the result. It clearly did. In the case of McAllister's sin-binning, Jauzion milked it (you can see him fly backwards, arms flailing as if from some mighty impact while McAllister, who is presumably made of solid granite, just turns and runs back toward his line) and Barnes, in his second year of test refereeing, lost his composure. Barnes blew his whistle nine times before he calmed down enough to talk to the players and send McAllister from the field. You could almost hear his heartbeat jackhammering in his ears. Having looked at the clip more times than is probably wise, I don't think it was even a penalty. Missing the forward pass in the clinching French try was forgivable, given that he was unsighted, but on another day perhaps that wouldn't have happened either. I guess it's our fault for following a game where officiating isn't so much a matter of adjudication as opinion.

The game would only have to have been microscopically different for the narrative to have changed entirely. Had the forward pass been spotted and the ball returned to where it had been most of the time -- in the French half, in the hands of the All Blacks -- we'd probably have been hailing So'oialo's try as evidence of the All Blacks grinding their way back against outrageous fortune. If the All Blacks had snared that drop goal -- with both first-fives off the field -- or earned that elusive penalty on attack, it would have been "All Blacks snatch victory in thriller".

But they didn't, and what one of our correspondents characterised as a "cosmic joke" continues. But it's only a game, and I've had a hell of a lot of fun watching the All Blacks play in the past three years; they have frequently been brilliant. I'm going about my business and the young men involved will be feeling worse than anyone. I hope none of the bilious fools spewing angrily onto the newspaper forums gets within cooee of the team, because they don't need it. And neither do I.

PS: Jeremy Andrew has again won the Whisky Galore ad copy competition with "The whisky is younger than the All Blacks' losing streak ... but much easier to swallow ...". I have one more bottle of whisky to award, so keep trying once you know the result of Argentina-Scotland. I'll have to discuss the extent of the promotion with the good people at Whisky Galore now, but if you were to pop into their online store for a look, that would be nice.

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Quantum Competition | Oct 05, 2007 11:48

SOME FOREIGN FIELD A Rugby World Cup blog

Having solemnly taken on board the entreaties against over-confidence of my Dropkicks colleagues, I have come to a decision. I'm offering two fine bottles of whisky from our sponsors for this week's ad copy competition: one in case of victory, the other, unthinkably defeat against the French in Cardiff.

Think of it as a sort of quantum uncertainty competition.

Enter via the discussion for this post, as follows: study the Whisky Galore ads on the main Public Address pages, and give me up to a dozen words to run across two frames of the Flash advertisement. Humour is always good.

The best slogan referring to an All Black victory, and the best for an All Black defeat will earn a good dram delivered to the door. But on Monday, obviously, only one will actually be used in the ad.

I remain confident; a position somewhat buttressed by the impression that, short of divine intervention, Fabien Pelous is already making excuses for defeat.

Allez Les Noirs is confident too. Meanwhile Scrumbag (hat tip: ruggerblogger) sizes up the French team.

Returning to whisky, I celebrated delivering a major piece of work on Wednesday evening by cracking the Old Malt Cask Director's Tactical 1988, which I had been planning to save for the final, and pouring a couple of glasses. It was just the way I remembered it: sensational. Here's hoping it's a good omen.

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God is in the numbers | Oct 03, 2007 05:25

SOME FOREIGN FIELD A Rugby World Cup blog

Monday the papers were full of praise for the All Blacks. Highest points scorers ever (309) almost 100 points ahead of Australia (215). New Zealand also ran in a record 46 tries, 16 more than the Aussies.

Of course these are things you can glean for yourself just by looking at the points table.
Other stats easily viewable but not reported include:
• Fiji was outscored 114 for to 136 against and made it through to the quarterfinals
• New Zealand had the best points differential with 274, again 100 points clear of the Aussies
• Of the four pools, five teams didn't win a game (USA, Japan, Canada, Portugal, Namiba)
• Canada and Namibia were the only teams not to earn a bonus point.

But as we say, these are easy stats. So let's make it harder.

After extensively trolling the internet we constructed ourselves a data set from which we gleaned the following moderately interesting stats:
• Number of games won by the team with the least possession: 12
• Number of games won by a team trailing at the 60 min mark: 1 (Romania over Portugal)
• Least amount of total time spent in the opposition 22 during a game: 22 seconds (Canada against Australia)
• Team that spent the least amount of time in the opposition 22 (summed across all games): Tonga – 12 mins 29 seconds.

It's a trainspotter's delight out there, if you know where to look.

So now down to the serious business. How do the All Blacks stack up against the other teams in the Quarters, in the places it counts? We've compiled stats about gameplay, and broken the important stuff down into four main areas, Possession and Handling, Scrums, Kicking and Lineouts, and Defence.

And we're thinking it does not tell a positive picture.

Possession and Handling

We know that New Zealand has been making handling errors. We made the most in fact: 58 in total (followed by Romania and Scotland on 49). But you'd argue that this was because we had the ball more often right? Our average possession was a very average 54% (France had the most at 60%), so that means we were bound to have more handling errors?

Team	Average Possession %
France	60%
Australia	57%
Argentina	55%
New Zealand	54%
Scotland	50%
South Africa	48%
England	45%
Fiji	44%

Well, you'd be right. We mishandled about as much as the other major teams, per minute of possession that is. New Zealand's rate of handling errors per minute of possession is 0.3, too large a number to be discounted. In practical terms, that means on average for every three minutes it holds it the ball New Zealand will mishandle it at least once. In comparison, France will only mishandle once every five minutes.

Comparing the handling error rate of all teams in the quarters, we are, in fact, among the worst.

Team	Handling Errors, per Minute of Possession
New Zealand	0.34
Scotland	0.30
South Africa	0.27
Fiji	0.27
Australia	0.25
Argentina	0.25
France	0.22
England	0.21

Hopefully our large number of tries should balance this poor ball handling out, right? After all, our rate of tries per minute of possession was 0.27! The next down was South Africa on 0.16. But we think relying on this number is just being optimistic.

Team	Tries, per Minute of Possession
New Zealand	0.27
South Africa	0.16
Australia	0.16
France	0.13
Fiji	0.10
Argentina	0.09
Scotland	0.09
England	0.08

Scrums

We're concerned because, what happens after a handling error? That's right, a scrum, so perhaps we can counter our poor handling by winning scrums against the head. Unfortunately, the All Blacks have only won 7% of opposition scrums, while the much-maligned Australian scrum is winning 16%. Still the All Blacks can take some heart that in one game they packed down against the best scrum at the rugby world cup: Italy.

No really, Italy.

The Italian scrum won 97% of its own put ins (equal with England) and 22% of the opposition's put ins. This awesome scrum power is the reason Italy is also the second team most likely to win back the ball after a handling error. Italy recovered the ball 18% of the time behind the awesome might of England with 23%.

But, when comparing our rate of winning against the head with other quarterfinalists, we're faring poorly.

Team	Scrums Won (%)	Scrums Won Against the Head (%)
France	92%	21%
England	97%	16%
Australia	90%	16%
Argentina	97%	13%
South Africa	90%	10%
New Zealand	92%	7%
Scotland	82%	5%
Fiji	70%	0%

Kick it or Run it?

Still, as we know the game is often won through the boot not the scrum, so how's our kicking? Well we have an accuracy of 76% for place kicks (penalties and conversions). This is better than our biggest rivals, Australia has 67% and South Africa 73%, but nowhere near as good as Scotland (100%!!!)

If we decide to kick for touch rather than take the points we win 95% of our lineouts. Nice. But if it's our opponent's lineout we've got a meagre 18% chance of getting it off them. Unfortunately our southern cousins are much better at snaffling the lineout than we are, with Australia and South Africa winning 34% and 30% of opposition lineouts respectively. Here's the table.

Team	Lineouts Won (%)	Opposition Lineouts Won (%)
Australia	96%	34%
South Africa	91%	30%
France	93%	29%
Scotland	88%	28%
England	86%	21%
New Zealand	95%	18%
Argentina	88%	17%
Fiji	72%	7%

Defence

Ok, ok. No need to panic. "Defence wins championships" and we've got the best defence right?

Our tackling percentage (tackles made divided by tackles attempted) is 90%. That's pretty good. Of course... Australia's is 94% and France have 91%.

Team	Successful Tackle (%)	Turnover per Tackle (%)
Australia	94%	7%
France	91%	4%
New Zealand	90%	8%
Argentina	89%	6%
South Africa	85%	7%
Scotland	85%	4%
England	84%	4%
Fiji	81%	5%

But we do have the edge in the most important stat: turnovers. 8% of all successful tackles result in a turnover, and we have a high ratio of turnovers lost to turnovers gained (We have lost the ball 15 times and gained it 23 giving us a ratio of 1.5).

Once again though, we're outpaced by the Aussies who have a ratio of 1.8 the second best behind the monsters of Tonga (2.9, they got the ball 23 times and only lost it 8). South Africa are on 1.7.

But hey! Don't look glum! We still scored lots of tries in our pool of minnows.

The Dropkicks

Some Foreign Field is sponsored by Whisky Galore

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Players to Pray For | Oct 01, 2007 09:32

SOME FOREIGN FIELD A Rugby World Cup blog

People are praying for Daniel Carter, but I think we could win the thing without him, especially after Nick Evans' swift, skilful perfomance over the weekend. You'd be deprived of Carter's defensive qualities, and his frequently useful contribution as a spare loose forward, but you'd still be sending a bloody good first-five onto the field.

It's not that I'd want to lose Carter, but I don't think any of the All Blacks' most vital players are backs. There are no players, not even Carter, who are irreplaceable. Up front, it's a different story. Heading into the knockout rounds without Carl Hayman would be a nightmare, and losing Woodcock wouldn't be much better. Ditto for the loose trio: you wouldn't want to lose any of them, but It would be hard to contemplate a really big match without McCaw playing.

I'm struggling to separate Hayman and McCaw at the top of the list of Players to Pray For, but I guess you'd have to go with the captain. Next tier on the list: Collins, Woodcock and So'oialo. We're flush at hooker, where any of the three could credibly run on for a test match, and with Robinson fit, we could lose a lock without it being a complete disaster.

Anyway, Ted's calm, so I guess I should be too.

By contrast, the Australians are likely to be severely caught short without Latham (and now Lyons), and it's terribly bad luck for the Fijians that Nicky Little is gone for the tournament, after his capable and mature display in that cracking match against Wales. I would expect them to bruise, but not best, South Africa.

Argentina, on the other hand, should beat Scotland and progress to the semi-finals. They were far too strong and structured for Ireland this morning, and Scotland didn't show anything much in qualifying over Italy in their Six nations borefest. Can we call the Six Nations a second-tier competition yet? Well, actually, I wouldn't be completely astonished to see England creep pat Australia in the quarters: mildly surprised, but not astonished.

And yes, I think the All Blacks will run right over France in Cardiff. It won't even be close. Apart from the relative merits of the two teams on the field, there will be the crowd. The winner of Pool C was always goingto proceed to Cardiff, and that team was always going to be the All Blacks, as I'm sure many fans worked out long ago. The French on the other hand, never even considered the possibility that they'd finish second in their pool. It's an away game for France, and they're not that flash at those.

Meanwhile, over at Sport Review NZ, Richard Irvine has some humour. Oh brave, brave England …

Some Foreign Field is sponsored by Whisky Galore

PS: Congratulation to Auckland for the way they wrenched the Ranfurly Shield out of Canterbury's grasp and took it home. I do feel bound to observe that the carried-back call against Ward was possibly the worst TMO decision I have ever seen.

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