John Muggleton, Wallaby defensive coach, offers some brilliant insights into the art of defence. He pioneered the use of ideas from rugby league and was the brains behind the Australian victory at the 1999 World Cup – when they conceded only one try.
“Defence will be extremely important,” said Muggleton of the likely key factors to winning the 2007 World Cup tournament.
“The best defensive sides will be the sides in the semifinals.
“Scoring is at a premium. You saw the other day. The All Blacks scored an iffy try, we didn’t score a try and the rest were penalty goals. What will be really important will be discipline in defence, in this World Cup.
“Whereas defence in the past two World Cups has been the key, it will be discipline in defence this time, which will be huge.
“Who can do it for 80 minutes? Who can not give away silly penalties and penalty goals — because penalty goals are going to win this World Cup. We need our players to be disciplined, as well as to be effective.
“Defence has changed completely because the game has changed completely.
“It is more about unstructured play now. Most tries are scored from unstructured play — turnovers, kick returns. It has actually become a game where people really take the risk in attack, when they know the defence is not set.
“The emphasis now is how to go from attack to defence and doing that quickly. If you do lose the ball, what do you do, if they have the numbers?
“You’ve got to get them to waste space. You’ve got to make them pass the ball. You’ve got to make them play away from the scoring zone, while you get organised. So what we do is actually back off and hope they’ll pass the ball towards the sideline, use up passes and use up men so we end up with even numbers and we’ll close it down.
“In the past, we’ve tried to run up and shut it down straight away and that’s where you are disjointed in defence and they can find holes, draw a man and pass. They use up very few numbers, but they have an overlap so they score in the corner.
“Now we back off and let them play. We try and let them use up their advantage, shut them down eventually and try on the next phase to regain control.”
The Australians have incorporated elements of an “offensive defence” strategy into their gameplan for attacking the opposition from a turnover situation.
“We’ve always had that emphasis when we’ve had slow ball from the opposition or we’ve had superior numbers or we’ve got them on a sideline.
“We have a call where we increase our line speed, cut the field in half and really get stuck into them. We try to be effective first, aggressive second.
“If we can get a good hit, we’ll get on that ball straight away and we’ll turn that over. That’s fine, but we don’t try for that every time. The conditions have to be right for that to happen.
Speed off the mark is one of the keys to the successful Wallaby defence.
“It’s really personnel based at this stage because George is so strong — George can fly at a bloke and make the tackle.
“Whether another halfback can do that, we’ll see. You don’t have to, at this stage, because George is there and he’s playing well. It’s a little bit more aggressive, but also smarter in that it’s not done every time.
“You can’t just rush at people and expect to come away with a good result every time.
“The key with that is getting everyone to know when it’s on and when it’s not on.
“It’s coming along. I like to standardise things so everyone can do them. At the moment, the defence is a bit George Gregan style defence, so we’ve got to work on that and make sure we can do it, no matter who is there,” concluded Muggleton.
Fascinating insights into the art of defence – and the Wallaby approach in particular.
The “Gregantian Defence” discussed above is a much loved and more refined cousin of the highly agressive “CorneBliksem”. In the old days we had the “NaasPass” (which basically gave you a free pass to score, thus lulling the opposition into a false sense of security). A famous rendition, not seen for some time is the “CattsPyjamas”, which entails a lot of stomping over some hapless fellow on the white line! My favourite is the “Go speak to your men John!” one liner, used so effectively by the Irish (oh, hang on a minute, that’s a particularly offensive tactic). Lastly, there’s the “ButcherBoy”, invented my ‘Die Lem’ and continued by Mr B James… Now that’s what we love!