Welcome to this week’s edition of The Tip-On!
If you want to find about the connection to Northland — where some games in next year’s World Cup will take place — felt by a number of current Black Ferns, you can read an interview with Aleisha-Pearl Nelson and Te Kura Ngata-Aerengamate here.
All in-game data per ESPNScrum unless otherwise stated.
Runners and riders
With the 2021 World Cup pool draw having been confirmed last Thursday and the Black Ferns having concluded their abridged annual campaign on Saturday, now is a good to time to look ahead to next year’s tournament and consider where New Zealand stand as they prepare to defend their title on home soil.
While it’s hard to properly assess the performance of Glenn Moore’s side in their games against the New Zealand Barbarians this month given the lack of additional context, the fixtures did give the head coach the opportunity to look at the team’s “next tier of players” while still delivering a pair of wins — one fairly comfortable, the other less so.
Drawn from ‘Tier 1’ — where they sat alongside Canada and England — into Pool A for the World Cup, the Black Ferns will have the benefit of facing off against the ‘Tier 2’ side that is most familiar to them: Australia, who they have played 4 times since lifting the trophy in 2017.
Familiarity was the theme in each of the pools drawn last week: Canada were allotted to Pool B alongside the USA, while the Red Roses and France — who have just concluded a brief series against one another — are together in Pool C.
Looking at the records of these ‘Tier 1’ and ‘Tier 2’ nations against one other since the last World Cup, there is a clear stratification: at the top, England have won 14 of their 16 matches, and New Zealand 9 of 11; in the middle, France have recorded 4 wins out of 13, and Canada 3 out of 10; at the bottom, the USA have won 1 of 8, and Australia are winless.
Looking at the average number of points scored and conceded per game in these fixtures, these three levels also become apparent:
That said, the comparatively small number of tests played by women’s international sides — for non-European teams in particular — makes careful analysis necessary.
The Wallaroos, for instance, have not played any other ‘Top 6’ side but New Zealand over the last 3 years. While — given that they have lost all 4 of their games against the Kiwis by at least 20 points — we can probably conclude that they are unlikely to top Pool A, establishing their ability relative to the teams they haven’t played is difficult.
Aside from their ritual hammerings of Australia, this cycle has been largely positive for the Black Ferns — with a couple of caveats. They won the 2019 Super Series (a tournament contested by all of these ‘Top 6’ sides, except Australia) in San Diego on the back of a fairly comprehensive 28-13 victory over England in the final round, a result which bodes well for the knockout stages of the World Cup next year. (That was the only time the two finalists from 2017 clashed during this cycle.)
However, they did slip up against Les Bleues in their second game of the Series; that 17-25 defeat and a 27-30 loss to the same opponent in Grenoble in November 2018 were New Zealand’s only losses over this period.
One feature of the latter rounds of the Super Series was the parachuting into the team of a couple of Black Ferns Sevens players: Kelly Brazier started the final game against England at fullback, and Theresa Fitzpatrick came off the bench. Moore indicated last week that he expected to be able to reinforce his World Cup squad next year with a number of shorter-format stars, even despite the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics until the summer of 2021:
Those sevens players really stood out in the Farah Palmer Cup earlier this season, with Portia Woodman in particular excelling in Northland colours. A starter in New Zealand’s 2017 final win, she affirmed Moore’s comments in a recent interview with Stuff:
While England knocked the Black Ferns off the top of the world rankings with their pair of wins over France, New Zealand still look in pretty good shape as they enter the home stretch of the 2021 cycle — and the prospect of being able to unleash Woodman and Stacey Fluhler in the same backline again, alongside their 15-a-side talent, would make it difficult to bet against them winning a 6th world title.
Simple game
We said last week that we didn’t yet know how much of the All Blacks’ defeat against Argentina in Newcastle was due to the improvement of Los Pumas rather than a poor New Zealand performance, but the South American side’s 15-all draw with Australia last weekend is more evidence that they have made at least some strides on the defensive side of the ball.
Between 2016 and 2019, Argentina conceded 35.7 points per game on average to the Wallabies and All Blacks; in 160 minutes so far in 2020, they have conceded 30 points total.
How have they managed to do this? To start with, Mario Ledesma appears to have pared back his team's gameplan severely as a consequence of the lack of rugby they have played this year. In their two Tri-Nations fixtures so far, they have kicked the ball much more frequently than they did against the Wallabies and All Blacks during the last World Cup cycle:
As the graph above shows, they also appear to have been much more successfully dominating collisions without the ball by committing multiple players to the tackle. (Australia had a bit more success advancing the ball than New Zealand did a week earlier — making 3.9m per carry to the All Blacks’ rate of 2.6m in Newcastle — but were still restricted to a clean break rate of 3.7%.)
This is something that the England men’s team truly excel at. They comfortably beat Ireland in this way back in February, and repeated their performance on Saturday at an empty Twickenham: the away side’s 149 carries were rebuffed by 208 English tackles — a ratio of 1.4 completed tackles per opponent carry.
It’s not an approach to defence that Kiwi sides have tended to take; across the All Blacks’ 5 games so far in 2020, their highest mark by this metric was 1.11 tackles per opponent carry in Wellington. However, the Crusaders did show in Super Rugby Aotearoa that they are looking to develop their work without the ball in this direction.
Letting fly
After giving Anna Richards, Melissa Ruscoe and Whitney Hansen the opportunity to work with the game’s top players as part of the Black Ferns’ end-of-year programme, New Zealand Rugby will provide another pair of female coaches with exposure to their elite athletes at the Red Bull Ignite7 tournament next week.
The appointment of Crystal Kaua and former Black Fern Victoria Grant (who both have experience on the Japanese professional women’s sevens scene) as the respective head coaches of the Bolt and Surge teams is another positive sign that the union is looking to develop women in leadership positions within the game, in line with World Rugby’s long-term goals.
The current Black Ferns Sevens coaching team is made up entirely of men, while analysis from earlier this year showed that there were only 8 women in total coaching in the 2020 Farah Palmer Cup.
Due diligence
As Christmas fast approaches, NRL franchises are already starting to put together their first-grade and development squads for the 2021 season.
In a reminder of how hard NZR have to work to retain some of their top talent — particularly in the Auckland region — the Warriors have had a number of representative union players in training with them at the start of their first preseason block: 2020 New Zealand Barbarians Schools fullback Jeremiah Asi, 2020 Blues U18 midfielder Francis Manuleleua and 2019 Blues U17 forward Zyon Maiu’u were all name-checked in this week’s press release.
Across the ditch, the recent announcement of the Canberra Raiders’ Jersey Flegg (U21) training squad provided a further indication of the level of research that some Australian clubs are willing to put in to pick up talented young Kiwis who fall through the union net. Joining Leo Thompson — twin brother of Wellington hooker Tyrone — in the nation’s capital next year will be Christchurch BHS back Jack Sandford, who played for the Crusaders U18s this year but has no national representative experience in either code.
Pass of the week
It’s sometimes easy to forget that this is already Quinn Tupaea’s third full season of NPC rugby.
Having excelled in 2018 in his first year out of school, the 21-year-old put together another strong campaign in the Waikato midfield this season as the Mooloos reached a Premiership semi-final. (In 681 minutes, he made clean breaks on 23.8% of his carries, offloads on 12.7% of his carries, beat a defender once every 2.5 carries and turned the ball over 8 times on 101 touches.)
The Chiefs, his Super Rugby franchise, had a difficult year in 2020, but the prospect of building a centre partnership of Tupaea and Anton Lienert-Brown should be one of the things that incoming head coach Clayton McMillan is most positive about for 2021. (The pair made 4 starts together for the Chiefs this past season.)
Tupaea’s contact work is generally excellent, but another feature of his game since school has been the quality of his alignment and passing. On Saturday against Auckland, he put these skills to good use to help create Waikato’s second try of the game.
After Auckland turn the ball over in phase play, Ollie Norris and Samipeni Finau are alert to the possibility of an opportunity on the far touchline and instinctively move the ball in that direction immediately.
When inside centre centre Bailyn Sullivan receives Finau’s lofted pass, he, Tupaea and blindside Adam Thomson are faced with a 3-v-2 against tighthead prop Jarred Adams and loose forward Terrell Peita in approximately 25m of space.
Sullivan’s attempt to put in some footwork opposite Adams actually decreases the amount of space they have to work with, but Tupaea does well not to mimic his partner to the same degree.
While Peita has turned his shoulders outward towards Thomson by the time Tupaea receives Sullivan’s pass, the 13’s relatively straight line of running pre-catch checks the Auckland player from drifting too early and means that Thomson still has a hole that he can attack on the outside.
Aware of this, Tupaea releases his blindside flanker down the left just a single pace after catching and gathering the ball from Sullivan:
While it’s not a perfectly executed 3-v-2 by any means, Tupaea’s fundamentals are again on show as he transfers the ball onward: his energy forward through the pass carries him upfield after he releases it, allowing him to stay alive in support of the former All Black on the inside.
The ball hits Thomson in stride without checking his momentum too much, and the flanker is able to canter in and finish in the corner himself.
Loose threads
In case you missed it on Twitter this week
Another week, another try assist for the Barbarians’ resident Canadian playmaker Cindy Nelles
Quick hits
The final game of the professional 15-a-side season in New Zealand will be the Māori All Blacks’ hit-out against Moana Pasifika in Hamilton on Saturday 5th December, and head coach Clayton McMillan announced his squad for the game on Tuesday; as well as the news that Tony Brown will be joining McMillan as an assistant, the inclusion of 20-year-old Canterbury tighthead Tamaiti Williams is notable. Fa’alogo Tana Umaga will coach the Moana Pasifika side, and has named a number of exciting young players with Samoan, Tongan or Fijian heritage in his team: Marino Mikaele-Tu’u, Naitoa Ah Kuoi, Etene Nanai-Seturo, Leicester Fainga’anuku, Josh Ioane and Salesi Rayasi have all represented New Zealand in recent years and may hope to do so again in the future, but will have the chance to play for “the other nations with which they identify” — as Sir Bryan Williams put it — at FMG Stadium Waikato in a couple of weeks.
The Hurricanes have been actively announcing the contract renewals of a number of squad players over the last few months — Jackson Garden-Bachop, Fraser Armstrong, James Blackwell, Vaea Fifita, Gareth Evans and Julian Savea are all signed through at least 2021 — and have now confirmed the addition of a pair of promising prospects to their roster for next season and beyond. 22-year-old loose forward Brayden Iose (signed through 2022) and 19-year-old outside back Ruben Love (2023) are both Palmerston North BHS products, although Love moved to Wellington to play his NPC rugby; Iose is an explosive ball-carrying back row who was first involved with the franchise back in 2018, while Love also got exposure to Jason Holland’s squad earlier this season in his first year out of school.
Bay of Plenty’s Luke Campbell has also been touted this week as a signing to fill one of the Hurricanes’ scrumhalf slots, but the franchise declined to confirm Stuff’s reporting. The publication also noted that Waikato head coach Andrew Strawbridge appeared to let slip that Xavier Roe will have a place at the Chiefs next year in his end-of-season wrap-up at the weekend.
In a piece for ESPNCricinfo, Matt Roller spoke to the England & Wales Cricket Board’s player identification lead David Court about how they use different types of data in their selection processes. Taking batter Zak Crawley — whose headline statistics in domestic game were unimpressive — as an example, Court explains:
Finally, read Ben Smith’s piece for The XV ahead of this week’s Pumas-All Blacks rematch to find out how Argentina were able to disrupt and slow the All Blacks’ ball in the first test in Newcastle.