TRI-NATIONS

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The irony of New Zealand`s win

Monday 18th August 2008

Dan Carter: Winning the old-fashioned way

Were you watching John O'Neill? 'More ELVs' comes the cry from Australia and South Africa. 'Quicker games', 'more tries', 'less territory', 'less kicking'. 'Yah boo sucks' to them comes the cry from the north.

We have heard so often down the months since the ELVs became reality that we have to move on from last year's World Cup, as it was a tournament dominated by the boot and defences. We hear how the ELVs open the game up whilst retaining all the game's core values of scrummaging and close quarter forward play etc etc...

Well, it's true. So true, in fact, that, bar the proliferation of free-kicks instead of penalties, Saturday's New Zealand win was founded on all the virtues of the pre-ELV game: quality positional kicking, watertight defence, and pillaging of the ball at ruck time. How ironic that the countries who wanted the change so badly are still winning the old-fashioned way.

All of which makes the game sound a mite dull, but, as so many have written in to point out, it was anything but. Plenty of tension, plenty of moments of fluid offloading and inter-passing, all that stood between us and a welter of tries was some skew execution and that defence.

This Tri-Nations has seen a myriad of fascinating tactical nuances, but one thing has been proven time and time again: namely that running the ball around willy-nilly the way the ELV-makers would have us do - or even the way Peter de Villiers would have the Boks do - simply doesn't work without a defensive tactical backbone. The teams who have scored the most points are the ones who have quickly mastered the art of kicking for position well and keeping the opposition deep. South Africa, playing Peter de Villiers' expansive style, are averaging under 12 points per game.

In the opening match, Dan Carter kept the pressure on South Africa, and the following week it was the steadiness os South Africa's ability to steal the line-out from Butch James' and Percy Montgomery's raking kicks that put paid to New Zealand - that and one moment of genius from Ricky Januarie.

Australia learned the lessons from afar. Solid defence and a couple of clinical finishes through tight gaps put paid to the Boks. New Zealand fell into the trap of trying to run from too deep in Sydney and were thumped. The following week, Dan Carter's boot and the impregnable line of following black shirts ensured the Wallabies couldn't get through, while Richie McCaw and co.'s hands ensured the turnover ball for the All Blacks to run in the tries and return the thumping. the same combination did for the Boks on Saturday.

After half a year of the ELVs, the game has speeded up, and there are fewer penalties. But the essence has remained the same: develop forward superiority and make sure there is clean ball at all costs, play the ball in the opposition's half, smash it up a few phases and suck in the defence, and hope a gap appears in the opposition before their openside gets a mischievous hand in. It's the game we all know and love: structured, tactical, but now faster. A perfect balance. It has made a mockery of the repeated calls for a trial of all 30-odd ELVs.

The people struggling most on the pitch seem to be the referees. Fans have been sold a dream whereby teams will run the ball from everywhere and there will always be clean ball to do it with, but that is simply anti-thesis to defensive coaches and back-rowers. It just doesn't happen like that. Yet now the dream has been sold in the ELV package, referees are under constant pressure to deliver it because armchair fans have been so pandered to in all of this that they have come to expect cheap entertainment as a divine right. That is a big shame.

So the north will be watching, and taking on the tactical lessons of the current crop of ELVs. They are the common sense laws that have opened up the spaces for the superior teams but taken away none of the thinking from the game. We do have a better product. and at no extra cost, and the calls for more law changes are ringing more and more hollow by the week.

By Danny Stephens