Things We Learned From the Tour – #3 Lack of Ideas

Things We Learned From the Tour – #3 Lack of Ideas

How many times have we bemoaned the lack of plan B for the Welsh rugby team? And yet it seems we are still left bereft of ideas, clueless, when our plan A is figured out. And that is no surprise as everyone knows Plan A and so simply need to devise a way of countering it.

What is Plan A? Simply soften up the midfield with Roberts, move it as close the the touchline as possible with successive blind forward drives and then spin open into the massive open field. But because we are so slow in doing it, and because teams have us worked out, there are no miss-matches created. The defences against us are well organised.

That is not to say that even vs well drilled defences it doesn’t work. We can and do make ground. But when it is consistently the same tactic then we are left letting the defences know what we are going to do, and set up accordingly.

Brief Moments

The Welsh Tour of New Zealand showed us, yet again, that we are reliant on these tactics working. And when they don’t we rely on individuals producing a moment of magic – and as this tour had no Hook and no Shane Williams (as well as the still missing Gavin Henson) we lacked the required players who are able to create something out of nothing.

There were brief moments, moments that gave us a glimmer of what could be. The most notable of which was the final 10 minutes of the 2nd test against New Zealand. Yes the Kiwi defence had, to a degree, gone to sleep with their job seemingly done. But that does not detract from what was some very promising attacks – one of which led to a try for Jamie Roberts, the other of which should have been a try but for a moment of white line fever causing Jonathan Davies to go for the line rather than use the two man overlap, and the get caught.

The Welsh Way

These attacks were promising not just because of their success but because they showed inventiveness. The forwards had secured front foot ball, and had started interpassing. Not just hitting the deck and rerucking, but offloading and running into space. Whilst the concept of the ‘Welsh Way’ is, imo, misleading media speculation used for brand purposes only it does describe a certain type of rugby.

A type that we have used before to success (2005) and a type that led us to go backwards (2006), or at the very least sideways – a lot. I certainly don’t want us to go back to those days of throwing the ball around willy nilly, but moving the point of attack, providing something different, aiming at space – these are things that have been missing from our game, and should be reintroduced as a method of varying our game, of keeping opponents guessing.

For instance the ‘move it as close to the touchline as possible’ (AKA Plan A) would work far better, imo, if the opponents were genuinely worried about a blindside break. So having the forwards interpassing there, mixing in with Shane and co to provide a real attacking threat down that side that occasionally breaks, will cause the opponents to be worried, forcing them to commit more numbers and so possibly exposing overlaps on our preferred openside wide attack.

A quick change of direction when it looks like we are starting to set our selves up to go blind often will cause hesitation, especially if a few offloads can put us beyond the first up tackles.

These are simple things – and I certainly don’t assume I have thought of them when Warren Gatland hasn’t. But whatever they have thought of, or even trained, isn’t getting put in place. We run the same predictable moves on the same predictable lines game after game – with only James Hook and Shane Williams showing any real invention – and even they bring other faults to their games.

Right now, to me, Wales are showing a complete lack of invention, barren of ideas. It really is time we had some much needed back up plans brought into our game.