Gulf in Style

First topic message reminder :

Firstly congratulations to Wales for pulling off a hard fought victory over the English on the weekend. England utterly dominated possession and territory but simply spent 80 minutes trying to run into the nearest defender. Even with an extra man for 20 minutes England seemed unwilling to attack space, or use any width or just stop telegraphing the inside crash ball. Wales by contrast with only a ten minute spell with the ball manufactured a try featuring superb, patient build up work, width, pace, controlled aggression and guile to leave the English defense no chance.

But the thing I wanted to comment on was the breakdown.

Wales and England seemed to spend the entire game in a Holly Wilaboobie-for-tat penalty exchange, where it seemed we couldn't string two phases together without someone infringing in some way in the contact zone. We had 2 yellow cards, and probably should have seen 2 more against Wales and 2 against England, but for the mercy of Rolland's judgement.

Allan Rolland, as restrained and patient as he was, still found the need to issue a staggering 31 penalties, stopping play more than once every two minutes in open play.

Roll forward to the South Africa v Australia game and we witnessed much more accuracy in that area. The technique was just from a different planet. Both teams seemed to know when to attack the break down, both teams stayed on their feet better and obeyed the referees guidance with regard to releasing the ball, the tackled player and the angle of entry.

The outcome? a much faster game with only 18 penalties.

I despair really, if team's will continue to prefer to give away a penalty every two minutes and happily wear yellow cards then the RWC will be yet another boring old kick fest with score lines featuring multiples of 3.

And finally, on this same issue of trying to keep the game slow. If teams decide to field guys with fitness levels that perhaps are not where they should be, I think the referees have to take a much harder line on the gamesmanship around slowing the game down. Steve Thompson in particular, when not standing up in scrums or otherwise blatantly scrummaging illegally with impunity, seemed to be sitting down sweating heavily and holding up the set piece. I would like to see referees issue immediate free kicks to stop this kind of time wasting.

TheGreyGhost wrote:

Great White wrote:What I would like to see is a concerted effort at improvement against Ireland.

That has to be the lowest bar I've ever seen set.

How about "surely we must beat Samoa this time"

I'd really prefer to see the guys try to think about maybe finding ways to consider the basis for establishing a method to start believing that they might be able to start putting the first steps towards the possibility of performing well enough to put the opposition under some pressure.