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Was that the best weekend of Men’s Six Nations rugby ever? When you have 90 point thrillers and historic first ever wins it feels impossible to distill the drama into numbers and graphs. And yet, there is always more to be learned when we peel back the narratives and examine the raw data. Let’s dive in…
Was that the best weekend of Men’s Six Nations rugby ever? When you have 90 point thrillers and historic first ever wins it feels impossible to distill the drama into numbers and graphs. And yet, there is always more to be learned when we peel back the narratives and examine the raw data. Let’s dive in…
Over the past few years, rugby has been trending away from high phase count attacks and more towards quick, incisive attacks where the aim is mostly to keep the ball alive and target the space. What we saw in Dublin, however, represented something of a throwback as both sides registered well over 100 rucks.
Confusingly, Ireland kept trying to launch attacks from their own half, most of which were fruitless. It is for this reason that, despite Ireland dominating possession, the territory battled ended up 50/50. When Ireland did manage to get into Wales’ 22m, they scored an average of 3.3 points - which is very good. This shows that the energy they were expending in their own half was (literally) pointless.
From a Wales point of view, most of the talk after the game was around the herculean defensive effort that resulted in over 240 tackles - 32 of which were made by flanker Alex Mann.
However, those eye-catching defensive numbers distracted from what was yet another disappointing attacking display from the men in red. They were outperformed by Ireland in almost every metric and, for the 2nd game in a row, registered just 2 clean breaks. When your top performer for defenders beaten is a prop, you know something is wrong!
Where do you even start to analyse a game where 90 points and 13 tries were scored? Sean Edwards will have been furious as he watched France’s defence let Scotland score 7 tries from just 9 22m entries. An average points per entry of 5.5 is almost unheard of a test level.
The secret to Scotland’s win was their immaculate ball retention. Glasgow & Edinburgh are the 1 & 2 club sides in the world for touches per error - meaning they go the longest between errors.
France are a team that thrives on turnovers and counter attacks but the Scots starved them of transitions and made no mistakes they could punish. The home side dominated territory and possession, having over 50 more the French yet making nearly half as many handling errors.
We must now ask questions about the mental strength of a French team that has blown a Grand Slam twice in 2 years with limp away from home performances, along with a lamentable defeat at home to a 14-man Springboks.
Some of the mistakes France made were inexcusable. They were penalised 3 times for off the ball tackles, twice for playing the 9 and twice for clearing beyond the ruck. They also threw 2 intercepts and their lineout, which is usually the best in the world, dropped to 75%.
There are many stats one could pick out from England’s historic defeat against Italy; it being the first one ever would be a start. The most telling stat of all, though, was the one that accompanied the team announcement: 9 changes from the team that lost to Ireland.
It could be argued that, after 2 bad defeats to Scotland and Ireland, changes were needed. And yet, Borthwick changing his 9, 10, 12, 13 and 15 suggests the panic but is not so much being pressed but smashed with a hammer. It is extremely difficult to convince people you have a ‘vision’ for a team when you are constantly changing the key on-field decision makers.
It was a historic win for Italy but, controversially, many Italian supporters are saying their performance on Saturday was arguably their worst of the Six Nations so far. The weight of expectation looked heavy on the Azzurri shoulders and with 70 minutes gone they looked like blowing it. However, in big games, big game players come to the fore: Tommaso Menoncello take a bow!
It is easy to see why Toulouse have got their chequebook out and signed this guy for next season; he was the reason Italy won. Both tries originated from his powerful breaks that left English defenders clutching thin air. No one in the England backline offered the kind of X-factor Menoncello brought, he was in a class of 1 on that field.