Autumn review?

[Digby]

NZ would want the same player from our midfield we want in our midfield, Manu.

[Banquo]

Judging by how they've performed and the mess that is their centres I'd say he'd walk in. That's more a comment on the All Blacks than Farrell.

I'd say he's way worse than either Lienart-Brown or Goodhue at 12. He'd certainly look like he was walking though.

Of course you would.

because that's my opinion. I think ALB is an excellent centre, and Goodhue fine. Do you really think he is a better 12 than either of them? and apologies, I was guilty of hyperbole, he isn't way worse, but he is not a very good centre by any benchmark I'd use. He's a passable 10. And I know frankly I'm shouting into the wind vis a vis most of the opinions that actually count.

[Banquo]

Not sure how useful this is..but

http://www.goalkickers.co.za/

Across all competitions, Farrell has stayed steady at a 78% goalkicking average for the past three seasons. Ford, on the other hand has gone from 81%, to 83%, to 88% last year.

Puja

well yes, and also he- faz- takes easier shots in general, or rather doesn't take on difficult ones much.

[Epaminondas Pules]

I'd say he's way worse than either Lienart-Brown or Goodhue at 12. He'd certainly look like he was walking though.

Of course you would.

because that's my opinion. I think ALB is an excellent centre, and Goodhue fine. Do you really think he is a better 12 than either of them? and apologies, I was guilty of hyperbole, he isn't way worse, but he is not a very good centre by any benchmark I'd use. He's a passable 10. And I know frankly I'm shouting into the wind vis a vis most of the opinions that actually count.

ALB is a good centre, though he does blow a little hot and cold at times. When he's on he's seriously good. For some reason they don't seem sold on him in any particular position, which is why he slots in and out of 12 and 13. Goodhue is, well from an AB standard, the worst centre I've seen them consistently play for a good while. A lot of that is how spoilt they were with some of the finest centres to play the game in the last 15 or so years. I mean they're even playing Rieko 'hands of clay" Ioane at 13. It is a tangent, but when he was mooted as playing 13 I think it was Rugby Pass who posted a video of his school highlights to say he was a born 13 and it was hilarious. In every sense he looked like a winger, just with 13 on his back. The amount of times the ball was in one hand and the wrong one to be able to distribute was epic.

He's a different player than ALB, I'm not that much of a fan of Farrell, certainly at 12, though there is something there that literally all the coaches at the highest level see both on the pitch and in leadership skills.

[Mikey Brown]

Not sure how useful this is..but

http://www.goalkickers.co.za/

Across all competitions, Farrell has stayed steady at a 78% goalkicking average for the past three seasons. Ford, on the other hand has gone from 81%, to 83%, to 88% last year.

Puja

So as we all suspected: Farrell steady as a rock and Ford a bit temperamental.

[Oakboy]

NZ would want the same player from our midfield we want in our midfield, Manu.

For sure, building anything around him in terms of future tactics has been proven pointless, regrettably. He is simply too injury-prone. Jones needs to sort out our centre pairing without Tuilagi and use any availabilty as a bench-bonus.

[Oakboy]

f a fan of Farrell, certainly at 12, though there is something there that literally all the coaches at the highest level see both on the pitch and in leadership skills.

Unless Jones leaves him out and tries someone else for a few games, I just don't see how he can measure Farrell's contribution/influence. He (and others) see Farrell's match-to-match performances as monumentally significant. As long as that remains the case, I think the team's ceiling remains wastefully lowered and that is the biggest concern of all.

[Epaminondas Pules]

f a fan of Farrell, certainly at 12, though there is something there that literally all the coaches at the highest level see both on the pitch and in leadership skills.

Unless Jones leaves him out and tries someone else for a few games, I just don't see how he can measure Farrell's contribution/influence. He (and others) see Farrell's match-to-match performances as monumentally significant. As long as that remains the case, I think the team's ceiling remains wastefully lowered and that is the biggest concern of all.

Measuring someone's influence by the hole they leave behind isn't a great method.

[Banquo]

Of course you would.

because that's my opinion. I think ALB is an excellent centre, and Goodhue fine. Do you really think he is a better 12 than either of them? and apologies, I was guilty of hyperbole, he isn't way worse, but he is not a very good centre by any benchmark I'd use. He's a passable 10. And I know frankly I'm shouting into the wind vis a vis most of the opinions that actually count.

ALB is a good centre, though he does blow a little hot and cold at times. When he's on he's seriously good. For some reason they don't seem sold on him in any particular position, which is why he slots in and out of 12 and 13. Goodhue is, well from an AB standard, the worst centre I've seen them consistently play for a good while. A lot of that is how spoilt they were with some of the finest centres to play the game in the last 15 or so years. I mean they're even playing Rieko 'hands of clay" Ioane at 13. It is a tangent, but when he was mooted as playing 13 I think it was Rugby Pass who posted a video of his school highlights to say he was a born 13 and it was hilarious. In every sense he looked like a winger, just with 13 on his back. The amount of times the ball was in one hand and the wrong one to be able to distribute was epic.

He's a different player than ALB, I'm not that much of a fan of Farrell, certainly at 12, though there is something there that literally all the coaches at the highest level see both on the pitch and in leadership skills.

I think ALB should just stick to 12, Goodhue isn't great by AB standards, but imo he'd still get in our midfield at 12 , he at least can run and defend .

I don't get Faz at 12 at all....his defence is shonky there if nothing else. I can just about cope with him being a bench option, given he probably wont miss too many kicks at goal, and sort of covers 12-ish.

[Banquo]

NZ would want the same player from our midfield we want in our midfield, Manu.

For sure, building anything around him in terms of future tactics has been proven pointless, regrettably. He is simply too injury-prone. Jones needs to sort out our centre pairing without Tuilagi and use any availabilty as a bench-bonus.

There's the rub, that's much easier said than done, and it can't be done in isolation in the absence of outstanding players there. You might work a backline around the likes of BOD, or possibly even Manu, but not around our options.

[Banquo]

Not sure how useful this is..but

http://www.goalkickers.co.za/

Across all competitions, Farrell has stayed steady at a 78% goalkicking average for the past three seasons. Ford, on the other hand has gone from 81%, to 83%, to 88% last year.

Puja

So as we all suspected: Farrell steady as a rock and Ford a bit temperamental.

James Haskell likes this post

[Digby]

NZ would want the same player from our midfield we want in our midfield, Manu.

For sure, building anything around him in terms of future tactics has been proven pointless, regrettably. He is simply too injury-prone. Jones needs to sort out our centre pairing without Tuilagi and use any availabilty as a bench-bonus.

I don't really get why you'd say he's too injury prone. He's been unlucky with injury, but that's different to being prone other than the groin issue, and the groin issue is hopefully resolved.

Yes we need a plan for not having Manu, but it's highly doubtful if he's available again you'd put one of your most significant assets on the bench, the people happiest to have him on the bench in a given selection would be your opponents

[Epaminondas Pules]

because that's my opinion. I think ALB is an excellent centre, and Goodhue fine. Do you really think he is a better 12 than either of them? and apologies, I was guilty of hyperbole, he isn't way worse, but he is not a very good centre by any benchmark I'd use. He's a passable 10. And I know frankly I'm shouting into the wind vis a vis most of the opinions that actually count.

ALB is a good centre, though he does blow a little hot and cold at times. When he's on he's seriously good. For some reason they don't seem sold on him in any particular position, which is why he slots in and out of 12 and 13. Goodhue is, well from an AB standard, the worst centre I've seen them consistently play for a good while. A lot of that is how spoilt they were with some of the finest centres to play the game in the last 15 or so years. I mean they're even playing Rieko 'hands of clay" Ioane at 13. It is a tangent, but when he was mooted as playing 13 I think it was Rugby Pass who posted a video of his school highlights to say he was a born 13 and it was hilarious. In every sense he looked like a winger, just with 13 on his back. The amount of times the ball was in one hand and the wrong one to be able to distribute was epic.

He's a different player than ALB, I'm not that much of a fan of Farrell, certainly at 12, though there is something there that literally all the coaches at the highest level see both on the pitch and in leadership skills.

I think ALB should just stick to 12, Goodhue isn't great by AB standards, but imo he'd still get in our midfield at 12 , he at least can run and defend .

I don't get Faz at 12 at all....his defence is shonky there if nothing else. I can just about cope with him being a bench option, given he probably wont miss too many kicks at goal, and sort of covers 12-ish.

Maybe with ALB. But that leaves them with the problem of who plays 13. They tried it with ALB 12 and Goodhue 13 and have now reversed it.

[Oakboy]

NZ would want the same player from our midfield we want in our midfield, Manu.

For sure, building anything around him in terms of future tactics has been proven pointless, regrettably. He is simply too injury-prone. Jones needs to sort out our centre pairing without Tuilagi and use any availabilty as a bench-bonus.

I don't really get why you'd say he's too injury prone. He's been unlucky with injury, but that's different to being prone other than the groin issue, and the groin issue is hopefully resolved.

Yes we need a plan for not having Manu, but it's highly doubtful if he's available again you'd put one of your most significant assets on the bench, the people happiest to have him on the bench in a given selection would be your opponents

He misses enough games over a period to be labelled injury-prone, IMO. If, say, Lawrence were to develop to the extent that he and Tuilagi could be played as a like-for-like 1st/2nd choice, perhaps you could continue down that route. I doubt that Lawrence is going to get to that level though I hope he does. I think a regular 20-30 minutes of Tuilagi off the bench would scare the opposition more than a 'paced' 80 minutes. A flat-out 80 minutes will too often break him.

[Epaminondas Pules]

I'd rather scare the opposition from the first minute.

[Digby]

If Tuilagi is injury prone because his achilles has gone or his knee got caved in at the side then every player is injury prone. He's missed big chunks sure, but I think prone is the wrong word, he's been injured often more than he's necessarily injury prone. And it'd be worth noting he's racked up a few hundred appearances, maybe low 200s or just shy, which isn't nothing.

I agree you wouldn't want to face him off the bench but that's because he's a problem to face, he's not reliant on having that extra bit of energy to cause havoc.

[Banquo]

Not sure how useful this is..but

http://www.goalkickers.co.za/

Across all competitions, Farrell has stayed steady at a 78% goalkicking average for the past three seasons. Ford, on the other hand has gone from 81%, to 83%, to 88% last year.

Puja

it is also quite interesting that Farrell's percentage kicks have stayed constant (actually decreasing over his career slightly), but his value add has dropped ..ie he is having less success on trickier kicks.

[twitchy]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/rugby-union ... -not-club/

Brian Moore interviews Eddie Jones: 'How you play Test rugby is not the same as club rugby - that's where people get confused'



Brian Moore: How do you respond to the claims of a lot of people that England are boring?

Eddie Jones: Ha, well yeah, I think it's all about playing good rugby and every Six Nations game that I've been involved in - and Brian, you have been involved in a lot more than me - they're tough, physical, grinding games and you've got to find a way to win them. And the only thing that counts in those sorts of games is to win. And you look at 2020, we won the Six Nations twice, once in its traditional form, once in a new form. Now, I don't think any team has ever done that.

BM: You have mentioned that the game at the moment is in a power phase. Now, I don't disagree with that. I just wonder about your approach to it. What do you do if it is such? Do you seek to match it, outmatch it or find ways to get around it? What’s your approach?

EJ: There'll be some teams we take on with power where we think we have a power advantage and other teams we will try to play around it. So no, we don't have a fixed style of play. I think you play to your strengths. You always play to your strengths and then you tactically manoeuvre your game to take away the strengths of the opposition and attack their weaknesses.

BM: You’ve talked about kicking stats, and the correlation between success and the teams who kick the most. I don’t know why it has come as a surprise to people - but can you explain those?



EJ: Yeah, well France in the Autumn Nations Cup final stayed in the game for such a long period of time because they out-kicked us. And at the moment, the longer you keep the ball in Test rugby, the more times you keep the ball over three phases, the greater the chance of a turnover. And the more times you turn over the ball, the less chance you have of winning the game. So it's a pretty simple game at Test rugby at the moment. It's not the same at club rugby. And that's where people get a bit confused. At club rugby, you can probably keep the ball up to eight phases. Test rugby, it's about three. And then you have to be accurate and you have to be attacking and you have to be tactically good at kicking the ball.

BM: My summation was it wasn't that England's tactics were wrong, they just didn't kick as well as they should have done. And people get it wrong about what is a good and bad kick. Now, you've talked a lot about transitioning. How far along have you got with that?

EJ: Really pleased, mate. You know, still very much in the infancy, we have still got nappies on. But yeah, the try that Jonny May scored which Maro [Itoje] initiated against Ireland, that 100m try, was a brilliant try. And we're really working hard on that. We're giving that a lot of priority. We've now got a tracking system that can measure the players' work off the ball, which is going to become increasingly important. So we feel like we're in a good position to take advantage of that in the future.



BM: You've mentioned the mantle of favourites - it hasn't always sat well. Would you say England have to accept that? How do you go about implementing that mindset, about them accepting without difficulty the tag of favourites?

EJ: Yeah, it's embracing the pressure, understanding that the pressure's coming, finding ways to look at it as an opportunity, not as a threat. You know, it took New Zealand eight years to get over that mate, and we're in our second stint now and I would expect that over the next period of time with the growing maturity of the team. I think people don't understand how important it is to have a mature team to handle the pressure of big games. And we're starting to get that now. We've got some good young players coming through. They're going to push the barrier. So it's a mindset, but it's also the practise of doing it and learning from it and then going again.

BM: I think part of the maturity is enjoying bullying people, in the right way. Now people threw their hands up in horror when I said this, and I said, 'no, you've got to enjoy putting people away'. It doesn't matter what the standard is, you set your own standards and you give it to people and you keep your foot on and you don't apologise, because that's not the way things work.

Now ball-carrying always comes up. We had a discussion about the variety of ways that defences are broken down. And we agreed at the time, England weren't quite there in terms of their sophistication of ball-carrying. They did get there in the last World Cup. It seems to me either they've been worked out or not quite where they were on the variety of the angles and the people taking the ball into contact. Where are you on that?




EJ: Yeah, I think you're right there. Look, you know, our attack was at its best in the World Cup because we had that really good preparation time. I think one thing, looking at a number of sports at the moment, I don't think players are very sharp. You know, those little details, the one or two degrees, a half yard. And it's because they're playing back-to-back seasons. And I'm not making excuses for players and not making excuses for the team, but that's the reality of sport. I see it in football. I don't see the passing being as precise in football as possibly it has been because players, at the moment, we all know what they've got to do because we've got to keep the sport going and it's so important. But what they're being asked to do is pretty huge. And I think they're coping well. And you'll see, I reckon in the next 18 months rugby will come back. You'll come back to some preciseness in attack, and people will get better at attacking rush defences. You know, even the tenth best team in the world now can rush consistently. They can rush from second phase. Look, we made a line break on second phase against Wales. On third phase, by the time George Ford got the ball, [Dan] Biggar was straight on top of him. That's the change in the defence. And you've got to get better at attacking that.

BM: What about leadership. Have you got enough leaders? Where are they?

EJ: Yeah, and I think we are taking some really good steps forward. Owen’s [Farrell] maturing as a captain. I thought Maro [Itoje] took a really big step forward in the way he led by example and particularly in that [Autumn Nations Cup] final, where he was just a colossal force. Mako [Vunipola] continues to grow and we've got a few others starting to spur up. Young Tom Curry's starting to be a greater voice in the team. So I think we're moving in the right direction, but we'd always like to get there a bit quicker. But we’re getting there.

BM: What from the last World Cup do you think you can take as a lesson for the forthcoming one?

EJ: Well, it's your ability to get up after a big game. You've always got to be at your best to win the semi-final and it's your ability to regenerate, refocus and get ready for the next one. And that's something we'll continually work on for the next three years.

BM: Can I just finally talk about the 2023 draw, England are in a pool with Japan and Argentina? What about that and about the possible crossovers?

EJ: I always look at it mate, you have got to win four big games, you've got to win one big game in your pool and we might have to win two big games with Argentina and Japan. I am in Japan at the moment and everyone's excited, they couldn't be happier having England in the pool. And then you've got to win your quarter, semi and everything else. You know, the pool's exciting because it sort of sets your project in place, but the reality is nothing's really changed for us. We've got to be at our best and that's all you can be, just be at your best.

[Stom]

What I really hate about these articles is that the journalist inevitably sticks to pre-framed questions and doesn't ask follow ups. I mean, Moore asks a question, gets an answer, says a sentence related to the answer, and then asks a different question! What about the follow ups? Where's the insight? We all know the basics, Jones says them enough times.

In the end we learn nothing new, we don't provide content for anyone with a more in depth knowledge or understanding of the sport, and those with a passing interest aren't that interested in reading/listening to this anyway...

So it's an absolute waste of time for everyone.

[Mikey Brown]

Possibly just poor wording, or wilful misinterpretation on my part, but France “staying in the game for so long” made me laugh. Weren’t they literally ahead or level for the entire game?

Nothing to do with their physicality, their set piece or their unbelievable defence? Nope, all about the kicking.

[Oakboy]

Possibly just poor wording, or wilful misinterpretation on my part, but France “staying in the game for so long” made me laugh. Weren’t they literally ahead or level for the entire game?

Nothing to do with their physicality, their set piece or their unbelievable defence? Nope, all about the kicking.

That, on the back of scraping a win over their 3rd XV.

[Oakboy]

What I really hate about these articles is that the journalist inevitably sticks to pre-framed questions and doesn't ask follow ups. I mean, Moore asks a question, gets an answer, says a sentence related to the answer, and then asks a different question! What about the follow ups? Where's the insight? We all know the basics, Jones says them enough times.

In the end we learn nothing new, we don't provide content for anyone with a more in depth knowledge or understanding of the sport, and those with a passing interest aren't that interested in reading/listening to this anyway...

So it's an absolute waste of time for everyone.

Quite. I usually quite like Moore's journalism but this was just feeding Jones the right lines. Let's face it, over the decades, England have been accused of being boring countless times. Jones might at least have responded to why Moore asked that question at this time, though (whereas nobody did, say, two years ago). Something might just have changed?

Does it say if this was zoom/phone or whatever? Maybe, it was more pre-programmed than face-to-face would have been (ironic, that!).

[Spiffy]

Can't stand these interviewees who call everyone "mate". Fair makes you squirm, doesn't it, mate.

[Digby]

You mean Australians?

[Spiffy]

You mean Australians?

Mostly. But it's not unknown in the Estuary lexicon. You know - the kind of 'orrible sounds made by L. Dallaglio, Jamie Oliver et.al.