Will We Be Kicking Ourselves With Our Kicks?

Another quick rugby post here (Who says it's a minority sport that nobody cares about? I'm going to ram it down your throat until you do!).

With the Rugby World Cup fast approaching, it's time for the squad lists to be released and the speculation to begin.

There is nothing most Northern Hemisphere fans like more than to debate which Hemisphere is better. I say most fans; us Scots don't bother as we are fully aware of how much worse we are. The Southerners, too, rarely indulge in this banter. Why? Because they watch the Super 15 every week.

Belittled all the time by Northerners for it's "awful refereeing", the Super 15 does admittedly have somewhat laxer standards at times, mainly in the contact areas of play. But it is definately innovative in it's defensive play and is light years ahead of Europe in attack.

In particular, the Antipodeans in New Zealand have blurred the line between attack and counterattack, launching foray's into the defense when ordinarily we wouldn't expect them to.

I'm bringing this up now mainly because I have a great example to show you, from the recent Stormers Vs Crusaders match.

Apologies for the quality. The Stormers had turned over the ball on their 22 and have just kicked it away downfield under pressure. The Crusaders 10 at the bottom left is about to catch this kick. Notice that the ball has essentially gone from 22 to 22 (basically, as good a kick as it gets for the defending side), and then look up at how many Crusaders there are back in support. There are 5 men back with the kick catcher (and another bloke just out of shot). Not a single Stormer player is near any of them, and they have already formed a strong attacking line before the kick has even been caught. The Crusaders proceed to move the ball down this line and score about 30 seconds after this screenshot is taken.

Let's not forget that the Crusaders are playing away from home in a hostile 50,000 capacity stadium.

The speed that this backline got back from a failed attack downfield and set up and attack again is beyond anything a Northern Hemisphere team has produced for several years. England have Ben Foden, who has this mindset but is too often left to field kicks on his own. The French can occasionally play like this in some matches, but certainly they can't rely on it.

And for us Scots, and any other unlucky crap nation that comes up against the All Blacks (or Australia), then heaven help us. With two out of three Scottish possessions ending in a kick, we would be annihilated playing the way we currently do.

GM