The Times, that British paper, has a wonderful section on how England did in this 6 Nations. Presumably it forgot that it is also meant to cover Wales as well, but let’s skip over that. In it the stats show some interesting facts for Welsh rugby supporters… interesting if you weren’t watching the games anyway.
Now I am not a big fan of statistics, they can be used in almost anyway you want. I recall Gareth Jenkins going on about linebreakds showing we did well or something just after we got hammered by England before the last World Cup. Often it is better to simply rely on what your eyes are showing you.
But these stats are interesting because they back up what we thought about the Welsh campaign anyway – some good stuff but surrounded by an awful lot of crap.
In it we see that we had the 2nd worst tackle completion percentage (90%), and the 2nd worst tries conceeded (11). Which shows how poor our defence was. Sean Edwards pointing to interceptions is all well and good but there are still an awful lot of tries that didn’t come from an intercept. Too many. Our defence, very obviously, wasn’t good enough and someone needs to start coming up with answers. Far from being the ‘weapon’ it was back in 08 the move away from the ‘pure’ blitz has made it leaky and hardly something to fear.
Our lineouts were shocking, only Italy having a worse lineout – and that was only saved by a good performance in the last game. And before we congratulate ourselves on doing well in the lineout there remember who the only team to have a worse one was.
The worst stat is the errors made though. This was easy to see time and again. Spilt passes, knock ons in tackles… the list seemed to be endless. Someone managed to count them all though and made it to the number of… 84. The next closest was 65 and the top 4 were all in the 50′s. This, to me, shows we can’t just blame the coaches for game plans and selections – the players were making error after error themselves, often school boy stuff.
Turnovers too, we only managed to be kept off the bottom by England. When you consider that, going into the last game, Martyn Williams was 2nd in the turnover table that shows how little the rest of the team were doing here. The backrow balance was off and it showed. We needed the likes of Ryan jones and Jonathan Thomas to front up at the breakdown, and they didn’t until the last game.
There was some good stuff of course. The stat showing offloads was interesting, I didn’t think we were doing that well there… but obviously it was behind the gain line a lot of the time – offloads are all well and good but you need them to be to people going forward, not a panic pass out of the tackle. And a lot of the problem here was a lack of support runners, who were more interested in being behind, waiting to clear the ruck, than they were in looking for the ball. Tom Shanklin showed us what we were missing in his brief cameo.
There were mistakes, a lot of them, and this stat list shows a fair amount of what went wrong. Stats can sometimes tell a misleading story but in this instance they got it right – Wales were poor, very poor.
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