Analysis: How South Africa’s defence has improved
Our analyst Sam Larner returns to Planet Rugby and this week he lavishes praise on South Africa’s smart defence in the Rugby Championship.
I am currently in the beautiful city of Seattle in the US. It is a place pretty much dominated by sport; they have a baseball team, an American football team, and the double Major League Rugby winners the Seattle Seawolves.
Due to the surprisingly communist way American sports run their leagues; with a salary cap and a draft which aims to ensure no team gets left behind for year after year, some teams go through periods of tanking. Take American football for example; they have a salary cap which cannot be breached and a team of players who expect more and more money as they get better.
At some point the maths, or should I say math, stops making sense and somebody has to go and a younger or less capable player gets brought in on a lower wage. That is fine for successful teams, you take your best players and you remove one link and hope to replace that link with a slightly weaker one without seriously impacting the overall team. If you have a less successful team who, nonetheless are getting more expensive then you have a decision to make. Do you keep going and replace not great parts with slightly less good parts year on year or do you tear it down, sell every expensive player, and rebuild from the ground up? Unsurprisingly, more and more teams have been doing the latter and enter seasons with no intention of actually winning. In fact, it’s better if they do lose because then they get the first crack at the next mega talent in the yearly draft. The worst team from the previous year picks first in the draft.
Of course, rugby doesn’t really have a salary cap in the same way and so teams never need to make room for cheaper players. That is obviously even more the case in international games where anybody can be paid any amount deemed fair. However, there is a similar situation at play. If you are an ageing team then you risk having a massive vacuum when your ageing players retire and hand over to a bunch of inexperienced young men and women who have either no or very little experience of international rugby. You can end up with some really lean seasons if that transition is not managed.
South Africa are currently managing their transition as they welcome back an increasing number of European-based players and also rest, or at least not select, some of the backbones of the squad. You would expect defence to suffer, where squad stability is all important, but they have so far conceded fewer than 18 points in both their games against Australia and New Zealand. How are they doing it?
We are probably all familiar with this attacking set-up; a pod of forwards with a back option out the back. It works because it forces the defence to commit to stopping the pod and the back can then attack the defenders who are caught between defending the pod and defending the backs. The South African system is very clear, two men defend the two players in the pod and the rest hold their line until the ball is released out the back.
The ball is released out the back and the two defenders set to defend the pod do their job. That means that when Samu Kerevi receives the ball he has nowhere to go, the pod has used up two of his men and taken out two South Africans but everyone else has stuck to their assignments.
Again, South Africa assign the correct number of defenders to halt the pod and once they are sure that is being covered they shoot extra defenders into the outside channels to force the attack back inside and back to where their strength is. It’s a relatively simple concept; if you can’t match the power of the pod then your opposition will just keep using it but if you over commit to stopping the pod the attacking team will just put the ball out the back and attack the space you’ve left. You need to differentiate between those who will guard the pod and the rest of your defenders, if you get that communication sorted then you should find that this element of the game plan is negated.
The last example from the Australia game. This is the hard running Kerevi rather than a pod of forwards but the principle remains; sort out the immediate threat without compromising your defence out wide. With only one attacker you can afford to commit two defenders to him and be confident you have the outside attack covered. Notice though how South Africa commit two defenders but the outside man has the option to peel off if the ball is sent behind. The South Africans then only have one man defending the dummy runner with the outside defender now directly in the line of sight of Tevita Kuridrani and pouring pressure on him.
Of course this set-up will come under pressure in open play, it’s simply not always possible to have all your pieces in the correct places all of the time. In this case the four South African defenders communicate flawlessly to decide who will be defending who, as you can see by all the pointing. Knowing that all the options are covered gives them the freedom to attack and although the tackle is missed and the All Blacks gain some yards the set-up was perfect and should have resulted in a tackle for a loss.
Against Australia the pod defence had been quite passive. The goal was to limit the impact off the outside pass and so the pod had been allowed to get a bit of a head start. Against New Zealand the defence was much more aggressive. The goal was to limit the impact of the outside pass and also to knock the pod backwards. In this clip you can see that all options are accounted for and so South Africa are comfortable charging someone up to hit the pod. A little tip pass could have caused them some problems but they still had two defenders as cover. It’s like streaking through a town wearing a beige skinsuit; it looks risky but you actually have a lot of cover.
Nobody is perfect though. If South Africa want to play the blitzing game then they need to get the basics right and they don’t in this clip. The end result is that the ball is turned back over to South Africa after a chip through but they were playing on the edge. Makazole Mapimpi really doesn’t need to be rushing up here. Their ball out the back defence relies on all attackers being covered, once that is met then they can blitz. He ends up covering three attackers single handedly because he has been disconnected from his inside defenders. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime but this does show the risks. Any defence will find it hard to defend when they are outnumbered but the key to ensuring consistent application of the defensive playbook is communication. They need to number off quickly, identify if they have enough to blitz, then do it. If that communication doesn’t happen then you will end up with a whole team doing 15 different things and that isn’t a recipe for success.
Conclusion
South Africa head to Argentina for their final game knowing that a bonus-point victory will secure the title and a victory of any sort will be enough if the All Blacks can’t overturn their points deficit. The most important thing is how the defence is progressing; just last year in the same tournament they conceded 26 points per game, this year they will probably stay under 20. Add in a few more high value players and you are looking at an incredibly hard to beat South African side.