Analysis: Leaky Leicester must fix defence

Adam Kyriacou

Our analyst Sam Larner returns to Planet Rugby and is studying the dismal defensive work going on at Leicester Tigers so far in 2018/19.

Often in these articles typically I say that teams are either good or bad, but that’s in the context of the excellent teams around them. I might say that a team is bad at attacking but that’s in context of the amazing attacking teams they play against, if you put that team in your local league they would obviously look unstoppable and no longer have attacking issues.

Unfortunately, Leicester Tigers are historically bad at defending. So far this season they have conceded 4.33 tries per game, that’s averaging a bonus point to your opposition in every game you play. That means that if the Tigers continue with this historic level of terribleness all season they will have conceded 95 tries in 22 games. Since 2010 only four teams have conceded more than 80 tries each season; the woeful 2014/15 London Welsh side (147), 2016/2017 Bristol (94), 2017/18 Northampton Saints (80) and 2017/2018 London Irish (85). Only Saints didn’t get relegated. You can do well in the Premiership without being as frugal as Saracens but you can’t do well if you’re as leaky as Leicester are this year.

The rot set in a while ago. This decade has seen a dismantling of the once great Tigers’ defence and their league position has tumbled along with it. What are the Tigers doing defensively though and how might they be able to turn this around? I looked at their defence in their excellent encounter in Racing 92’s futuristic stadium.

This is the build up to the Racing second try. At this point the Tigers are missing Manu Tuilagi, in the bin after a deliberate knock-on. They should be shorthanded but this is coming from a line-out so they had some options, they could have dropped a player from the line-out or moved Ben White into the defensive line for example. If Simon Zebo is covered by the defender next to Nigel Owens and the rest of the defenders drift one player over as soon as Finn Russell passes the ball, and the sweeper takes the winger, then the overlaps disappears.

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That doesn’t happen though. Instead, the defenders blitz up, then stop, and a relatively straightforward pass from Russell ends up with a simple overlap. The Tigers defensive line is completely disconnected, the inside two defenders come up very quickly with the outside two further behind. Matt Toomua falls over but he steps in, as if to push the attack back inside when he really needed to drift outwards. In the end there are three Leicester defenders focused on two Racing attackers.

This is the next Racing try. There’s no obvious threat here for Leicester, but that doesn’t stop them creating one. Anybody who has watched Ireland will know that they regularly run a play where the scrum-half runs at the gap between the first and second defender, hoping to draw the first defender, and then flick the ball back on the inside to, normally, a winger who runs through the hole left by the first defender who has been drawn out of position. It shouldn’t work, the second defender should be able to step in and make the tackle and the first defender should never move from his spot next to the ruck, but it so often does. This is just a variation on that theme. Russell attempts to drag Ellis Genge out across and then put Zebo, used to doing this, through the hole opened up on the inside.

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As you can see from the clip, Genge rushes out and Russell just has to step him which forces Sione Kalamafoni across and it all unravels from there. Again, as with the first example there is a massive disconnect between what everyone is doing in the defensive line. If everyone went up at speed then this doesn’t happen and if everybody stays put it doesn’t happen. The fact that Genge decided to try and do the defending on his own suggests a lack of trust in the rest of the defensive line.

Rugby doesn’t really get simpler than this. The scrum-half attacks the guard defender, the body guard defender drifts away from him and another attacker runs straight through the hole just created.

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I don’t know why Dan Cole is trying to push out when he has three attackers directly in front of him. He might have been called to work across to the openside but there’s no threat that the ball will go wide in this scenario, so he would have been better staying put and maybe even calling his outside defenders in. Again it’s the same old story though, the Tigers create their own issues by setting up fairly well but then they end up doing very different things.

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In this penultimate example we go back to look at the Tigers’ wide defence. This is just poor identification of your own weaknesses. If you have Cole, or any front-row on your inside shoulder really, you can’t keep drifting. Tuilagi does keep going and that opens a massive inside hole, which is easily exploited. You might not want it, but during rugby games you will end up with slower defenders in key defensive positions and you need to learn how to react when that happens.

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Final example highlights yet more decision-making concerns for the Tigers. Racing get the maul moving forward and then turn it enough to block the Tigers forwards into a corner. This is an excellent attacking situation and it leaves you wondering why Toomua decided to try and compete at the next breakdown. He could have drifted out and let his forwards fill the gap between him and the breakdown but by competing he made them run all the way around and they couldn’t then get set for the next phase.

Conclusion

Some of the defending would leave you pulling your hair out if you coached an U13s side. The very basic elements of defending are not being displayed; things like positioning of your fringe players or connectedness in a defensive line seem like completely alien concepts. I find it hard to believe that the Tigers will continue conceding four tries per game until the end of the season and I find it hard to believe that they will end up at the bottom of the table, but there’s nothing to suggest that their defence is actually getting any better and, as the stats show, once you cross that 80 tries conceded threshold you have to be very lucky not to go down.

by Sam Larner