Down tools
Farah Palmer Cup: Round 1; Steinlager North v South
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Tip-On!
If you want to watch 20-year-old Tupou Vaa’i — who was without a Super Rugby contract a few months ago and spending his time doing building work with his father — let his family know he’d made the All Blacks, you can find a video of the beautiful moment here.
All in-game data per ESPNScrum unless otherwise stated.
Take the ball, pass the ball
For a pointless game of rugby, it was a pretty enjoyable one.
From the moment Caleb Clarke strode clear from the opening kick-off, Saturday’s interisland clash served up everything rugby fans could have hoped for: abrasiveness in the contact area, ingenuity on set-piece attack, creative use of the boot, ball skills for days and a finish for the ages.
Despite the South — powered by a cohesive Crusaders forward unit, plus Nepo Laulala and Shannon Frizell — prevailing 38-35 on the last play of the game, it was the North Island’s approach on attack that gave the encounter its real impetus: their 590 run metres, 25 clean breaks and 13 offloads on 111 carries (per Nine Wide World of Sports, which — like ESPNScrum — uses Stats Perform data) exceeded the South Island’s return on a similar number of carries (413, 9 and 7 respectively on 115) by some distance. Beauden Barrett dropping the ball onto his right foot just 2 minutes into the first half for Rieko Ioane to chase was a sign of things to come: a group of prodigiously talented athletes willing to give it a crack, playing to principles and within structures that encouraged the magic to happen.
The play that resulted in the game’s opening try wasn’t simply a Hail Mary on penalty advantage — it was all about filling the width of the field on attack to stress the defensive line, identifying the space left by an opponent and putting the ball there as quickly as possible.
In the 6 seconds before referee Paul Williams indicates that the South Island have infringed, Barrett swivels his head and scans the left side of the defence 4 times; with his younger brother Jordie defending on the other side of the ruck, there is a window of space behind the South’s front line. As soon as Williams extends his arm, Beauden beckons Damian McKenzie over to his right — creating a 4-against-2 overload in that 15m channel — scans once more for good measure and backpedals into position.
The fly-half has now loaded his weapon and placed his finger on the trigger:
It is Ioane who is the ultimate beneficiary of Barrett’s orchestration, with the centre accelerating through on the inside shoulder of Goodhue — whose chest faces the touchline, in anticipation of the threat posed by McKenzie, Anton Lienert-Brown and Sevu Reece — and collecting his Blues teammate’s beautifully weighted nudge.
Those same principles — fill the field, see the space, move the ball — can be observed in the North’s second and third tries of the game too. On 17 minutes, Ioane, McKenzie and Caleb Clarke execute a 3-against-2 short-side overload with some slick passing; after 45, their playmakers get loose forward Hoskins Sotutu running free on the right wing, thanks to a clever cut from Sevu Reece to sit down his Crusaders teammate George Bridge. (Both tries also show the importance of players on the inside staying alive after they move the ball on: 15, 13 and 9 all get second touches to finish the team’s second; 15 and 9 get themselves on the ball twice before the third is dotted down.)
But it is the team’s fifth and final score — a fine individual effort from Ioane — that best exemplifies the impact on a defence of repeatedly flooding the outside channels with threats and drawing tacklers’ attention towards the touchline. Leicester Fainga’anuku is the man marshalling the South Island’s line from 13, and when McKenzie gets on the ball at first receiver the defender has to be aware of Peter Umaga-Jensen and 2 back-row forwards beyond the 15m line on the left-hand side of the field — as well as Ioane attacking the line from depth:
The North Island have filled the field, and McKenzie has seen the space. When he moves the ball on to his centre, the home side have a 4-against-2 overload in a 25m-by-20m area of the pitch; when Fainga’anuku makes the decision to turn his shoulders outward — at 66:03 on the game clock, you can read his shirt number clearly — Ioane reacts to the cue immediately, and it’s game over.
When you can deliver clean ball to players of that calibre who nail basic attacking skills again and again and again, rugby is a simple game — fill the field, see the space, move the ball.
Storm warning
Auckland kicked off their 2020 Farah Palmer Cup campaign with a 38-0 win away to Taranaki last Sunday.
On a wet day, they were able to rely on their scrum and lineout to deliver try-scoring opportunities: all 6 of their tries came within 3 phases of a set-piece platform. To go with 2 scores on first phase from scrums inside the Taranaki 22m line, they struck from a pair of short-range lineouts and ran in 2 tries on 3-phase attacks from lineouts set between halfway and the opposition 22.
Veteran lock Eloise Blackwell was solid in the air, but 1.79m 19-year-old Maia Roos was particularly impressive at 2 in the lineout — a starter this year as a result of the retirement of Charmaine Smith, she delivered clean ball in the red zone for the Storm’s second and third scores of the day.
Waiting downstream?
The news this week that Amazon were attempting to enter the rugby broadcasting rights market in Europe — expressing an interest in the proposed Eight Nations tournament, according to The Mail on Sunday — might have future implications for the game in New Zealand, given NZR’s previous dealings with the company. (All or Nothing: New Zealand All Blacks — a fly-on-the-wall documentary series — was released on Amazon Prime in 2018.)
However, the Amazon-NZR relationship is unlikely to impact the domestic competition for the right to show Kiwi rugby, for a number of reasons. For starters, the fates of the national union and of existing local provider Sky are tightly intertwined: as part of the extension of their broadcast agreement to 2025, NZR took a 5% equity stake in Sky Network Television Limited.
It’s also important to look at the tech giant’s reasons for entering the European market. In an interview with the FT last weekend, Reed Hastings of Netflix opined that “there is no long-term profitability, nothing defensible”, in the broadcasting of live sport; sure enough, according to a sports marketing consultant quoted in the MoS piece Amazon are hoping to use this move to strengthen their online retail business — rather than seeking to make money from the initiative in and of itself:
While the establishment of a physical footprint in the market was rumoured a few years ago, New Zealand currently doesn’t hold the same strategic importance to Amazon: Kiwi customers’ orders are fulfilled from warehouses overseas, and so the company doesn’t have as much of an incentive to embed itself in consumers’ mental architecture as it does in Europe.
That said, media consumption in the country is only trending in one direction — with obvious implications for NZR, an organisation which now seems to be of the opinion that “televised rugby is its core product”.
According to NZ On Air’s 2020 ‘Where Are the Audiences?’ report — summarised here by Duncan Grieve for The Spinoff — only 33% of New Zealanders (and 17% of 15-34-year-olds) have access to SKY TV, compared to 57% in 2014, and daily use of both online video platforms (like YouTube or Facebook) and streaming services (like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime) is increasingly rapidly.
Sooner or later, the union will need to move with the times.
40% Club
World Rugby announced its Rugby World Cup 2021 Coaching Internship Programme last week.
This initiative will see them embed (and cover the cost of) an aspiring coach with each of the 12 national teams taking part in next year’s tournament in New Zealand, with a view to increasing the number of women coaching at the elite level — and meeting their target of “a minimum of 40 per cent of all coaches at Rugby World Cup 2025 [being] women”.
Top-level women’s teams in New Zealand remain some distance away from reaching an adequate level of representation in their coaching groups. In the international game, the Black Ferns are currently led by 3 men, with former Highlanders head coach Glenn Moore supported by Wesley Clarke and John Haggart; likewise, Allan Bunting, Cory Sweeney and Stu Ross make up the Black Ferns Sevens coaching team.
At provincial level, the picture is not much better: only 2 — or 15.3% — of the head coaches in this year’s FPC are women, with 2010 World Cup winner Mel Bosman taking over at Tasman this season to join Northland’s Cheryl Smith. Smith is assisted by Susan Dawson at the Kauri; in all, 6 of the 22 named assistant coaches are women.
Defending champions Canterbury have both Melissa Ruscoe — who was beaten to the province’s head coach job by Blair Baxter — and Whitney Hansen — daughter of — on their staff. (Hansen was also the forwards coach for the Black Ferns Development XV which took part in the Oceania Championship last November.)
Elsewhere in the South Pool, Aimee Sutorius is working with the Otago Spirit again in 2020, after a successful year for the team last year. In the North Pool, Black Ferns legend Anna Richards is aiding the development of Auckland’s young backline; the Storm’s Round 1 opponents, the Taranaki Whio, are assisted by former England international La Toya Mason.
Pass of the week
That Storm backline on Saturday had an average age of 21.1, with the relative experience of capped Black Ferns Ruahei Demant, Theresa Fitzpatrick and Natahlia Moors — all born in 1995 — balanced out by the exuberance of 4 precocious teenagers: Moana Cook, Princess Elliot (both 2001) and Patricia Maliepo (2003) all featured in last year’s run to the FPC final, and have been joined this season by Ponsonby’s Sylvia Brunt — who doesn’t turn 17 until next year.
The youngster started at 12 on her debut, and in the driving rain at TET Stadium in Inglewood produced a number of excellent touches inside Fitzpatrick in the Auckland midfield. After a first-phase move from a left-hand-side lineout just inside their own half didn’t quite go to plan, Brunt bounces to her feet and rejoins the action as Auckland play back towards the side of the original set piece — where hooker Cristo Tofa has held her width.
Tighthead Aleisha Pearl-Nelson finds Demant behind a simple screen, and the fly-half shifts the ball quickly onto Brunt; however, rather than continuing to move play laterally, she takes 5 steps forward to fix her opposite Paige Nelson before releasing Fitzpatrick with a flat pass pushed off her right foot:
Fitzpatrick is now free in space on the outside, and she and Tofa combine to beat the covering Whio defenders expertly.
Scheduled to travel to Whangarei next weekend, Brunt and her young teammates will face off against Northlanders Tyla Nathan-Wong, Portia Woodman and Victoria Subritzky-Nafatali in what promises to be a compelling clash between established stars and the new kids on the block.
Loose threads
In case you missed it on Twitter this week
A brief look at Canterbury and New Zealand U20 tighthead prop Fletcher Newell, focussing on his proficiency at set-piece and handling ability
A couple of examples of great attacking kicking from Fletcher Smith and Dan Hollinshead in last weekend’s Mitre 10 Cup warm-up games
Tyla Nathan-Wong’s footballing skill on display for Northland
Quick analysis of some of Ruby Tui’s excellent work on debut for Counties Manukau
Quick hits
Super Rugby Aotearoa and Super Rugby AU now look extremely likely to be reprised — with some adjustments — in 2021, with the expected continuation of travel restrictions between Australia and New Zealand preventing plans for a fully-fledged trans-Tasman competition from proceeding with any certainty. However, an end-of-season playoff between teams from the 2 countries is in the works, and the benefits of focussing first on a domestic tournament before broadening out at the back end have been touted by a number of administrators involved in the planning process. SANZAAR’s Andy Marinos expressed his feeling that, over time, Super Rugby had lost sight of its initial purpose as something “that complemented the domestic structure in each of the countries, not took over the domestic structures”, while Crusaders chief executive Colin Mansbridge was positive about starting local and expanding outward — even to a worldwide level:
Crusaders assistant Mark Jones gave a good interview to The Rugby Paper this week, in which he discussed his time at the Christchurch franchise. Having spent a season with the organisation, his feeling is that “[i]t’s built for success because everybody across the business has got an unbelievable connection with each other and, as a result, it becomes a really efficient environment”. He reaffirms that Scott Robertson — after losing Ronan O’Gara at the end of 2019 — was “keen to get somebody from outside the southern hemisphere who could come in with a different pair of eyes and not necessarily agree with everything that was being done already”, and was extremely complimentary about his coaching ability:
Having had a predominantly defensive remit in Super Rugby, Jones will now spend the next couple of months coaching Canterbury’s attack in the upcoming Mitre 10 Cup.
Japan’s men’s national team was set to have one of their busiest years in 2020, with games scheduled against 5 different Tier 1 sides. However, COVID-19 has been particularly disruptive: even after those original fixtures were cancelled, due to the government’s border controls the union have been unable to bring a number of the team’s overseas-based coaches back to prepare for the Eight Nations tournament mooted to take place during the November test window — and they have had to pull out as a consequence. After the highs of 2019, fans will now likely have to wait until January 2021 — and the start of the next Top League season — before they have any Japanese rugby to watch. This piece in The Japan Times is a good primer on the current state of the game in the country.
Cricket Australia’s latest Press For Progress Report is further evidence of the governing body’s “genuine progress” on their “journey towards being a truly gender equal sport”. At the top level, the women’s national team retained the T20 World Cup in March on one of the most special sporting occasions in the country’s history: in front of more than 86,000 people at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Their continuing dominance has also driven grassroots participation even further upward, with growth in the number of registered women’s players of 11% from 2018-19 to 2019-20.
Finally, read this piece by Murray Kinsella for The42 to get a sense of the positive impact that Ulster’s skills coach Dan Soper — a former North Otago representative, who spent years coaching at a number of schools and clubs across Northern Ireland before taking this job — has had on the province since his appointment in 2018.