Correct conclusion – South Africa were the best team at this tournament – but the rest is codswallop.

Firstly, as you know, the results in SA this summer were meaningless. Victories by any margin against another team’s 4th string don’t tell you an awful lot, except maybe give you a pointer to the other team’s strength in depth…or lack of it.

Secondly, SA rather got out of jail last night. I very much doubt the pre-game tactics were to play England at their own game. If SA and England played that match the same way another 10 times, I think the victories wold be pretty evenly shared.

This is not a defence of England’s style per se – their lack of penetration was always going to find them out eventually – but a defence of teams playing to their strengths. No other team deliberately plays to their weaknesses, yet this is what England (alone) are implicitly asked to do.

This wouldn’t make sense even if other teams were throwing the ball around inside their own 22. The fact is they’re not, or naything like it, at least not against the class oppositon. SA, Aus, France, NZ all have a game that means they have no problem running in a hatful of tries against the lesser teams (most of the time). England maybe beat those same teams with a couple of scores from driving mauls and kicks. But when the big teams square up, the games tend to be a bit like last night’s. Hugely physical, lots of high kicks and defences well and truly on top. This is especially so when the stakes are at their highest…meaning at the world cup.

You talk about the traditional SA way. They’ve won two world cups, scored fifteen points in each final and scored zero tries. Nope, this isn’t a criticism of SA who, by the way, are the best team around right now, but it does tell us something about the game in the modern era at the highest level.

Congratulations to SA.

dc

I rest my case in dismissing your knowledge of the game.

Well, if we exclude the games England have won by kicking drop-goals alone – which means none – then we are left with the games where the bulk of England’s points have come via penalties. The thing with penalties is that you don’t get them for nothing. England’s dominance up front means they tend to extract more penalties from the opposition than they concede. Becasue they have one of the best kickers in the world, this can often be enough to win. Because this is often enough to win, they don’t have to the play a more expansive – and inerently more risky – game to win matches. The moral of the story is don’t give up penalties to a team with Jonny Wilkinson at 10.

Enlgand don’t play the game they do because they have an entirely different rugby philosophy to the southern hemisphere, but becasue the strength of their team means they can , when playing well, win matches by kicking points. But the bottom line is that other teams can prevent this by:

a) competing at the set-piece and breakdown and matching England up front, and
b) not coneding penalties.

If they can’t do either of these things, they can’t. Don’t blame England, though.

To compare the SA kicking tactics in the England game to the tactics employed by England is plain silly – look to the scores in the respective games: there’s a reason SA won by a clear 36 points rather than by a very narrow margin of 2 or 6.

South Africa did indeed score 3 tries – they also missed 3 drop-goal attempts in a first-half where they dominated Enlgand in every facet of play. The fact remains, the victory was built on a conservative gameplan – kick the ball high and long at every opportunity – which they executed to perfection. My point about the comparison in tactics is that I’m forever hearing people lament Enlgand’s lack of running rugby, when the truth is not none of the top teams is playing that style right now. When any of the top 6 nations meet, it’s either Gary Owen after Gary Owen (NZ, Aus, SA, France) or ruck and maul after ruck and maul (Eng, Arg). Yes, some of those teams are capable of flashes of backline brilliance more than others, but it’s simply wrong to pretend that this characterizes their general play or signals a different attitude to the game. Right now, we’re in an era where defences are very much on top and the tactical kicking game reigns supreme.

Funnily enough, the 36-0 drubbing was England’s first world cup defeat since 1999 when South Africa beat us in the 1/4 finals. I seem to remember one team knocking over 5 – count ‘em – 5 drop goals that day, and they weren’t playing in white ;-)

The reason why the French lost is because they started doing the aimless kicking thing beloved by weak teams – a total mystery why.

It might be a mystery to you. See above, but also for my money they decided their best policy was to turn around our huge pack at every opportunity. There was nothing wrong with the tactic per se; it’s just their execution was awful.

If they had kept up the high tempo wide game they played for 10mins or so after the somewhat lucky England try they would have won.

Or they’d have run out steam by half-time and been pulverised by England’s pack in the second half. Who knows, eh? What we do know is that France began to throw the ball around at the end because they had no choice: they needed a try. It was desperation, not a rugby renaissance.

Well, I support the basic thrust of your comment, but on this point specifically, there’s a reason the All Blacks began the tournament as odds-on favourites.

Like you, however, I’m firmly of the belief that it’s about doing it on the field.

The “best” team is the team that wins in the tournaments that establishes which is the “best” team. That might be a tautology, but it is true nonetheless. Assertions that in some parallel universe New Zealand would win every year do not change the fact that in the world in which we live, New Zealand does not always win every year. people can anoint the All Blacks all they want. In this sport, we decide things on the field, as I suspect South Africa will decidedly do in a few days.

Cheers—dc

The problems I described are much more acute in my favorite form of football, the Association flavour. There are so few goals that it’s very common for the worse team to win; add in the travesty of penalty shootouts and the FIFA World Cup becomes a farce. Did Italy perform better than France under pressure in Berlin? Pfff!

There’s some truth in what you say and it’s no different to fotoball or cricket if you look at how their resepctive world cups are put together. On the other hand, isn’t there something to be said for the ability to produce on the big occasion and under the fiercest pressure?

Undoubtedly, New Zealand play the best all-round game in the world, but do you deserve the mantle “World Champions” if you consistently choke when the chips are well and truly down?

NZ simply haven’t learned how to win the biggest of big games. At least in part, I believe that’s down to their own refusal to accept the possibility that any team is good enough to beat them. Call it complacency, arrogance or whatever, but it’s a failing that true world champions don’t have.

A good analogy is sprinting. Asafa Powell sets world records for fun, but he can’t (yet) produce on the biggst occasions. Linford Christie, who never held a world record, was the exact opposite.

When there’s a few hundred million watching on TV all around the world, 80,000 in the stadium and you’re carrying the hopes of an entire nation on your back on the biggest occasion your sport can deliver, and you win, then you deserve “World Champion” status and no amount of mis-moves, gorgeous diagonals and scissors manoeuvres by a different team 3 months prior in a secondary tournament should alter that.