By Whaley Shark
May 19 2010

So we relived the highs (few and far between) and lows (many and very) of the season a while ago. I’m still trying to digest it all and I am not at all sure I understand what went on. Anyway, here’s my two pennyworth……

The ingredients of success include our approach to the season, the players themselves, and the way we play, so these seem to be the things to talk about. Please feel free to disagree.

 

Our Approach to the Season.

With limited resources, it does make sense to save your key players for the games where they can be most effective so, in the Premiership, that means putting out our strongest available side at home, and for winnable away games. Trouble is, when the squad has been depleted the way ours was this year, you reach the point when you’re pushed to put out much of a side at all for the low priority games, and I think, from Christmas, our team got off the coach expecting a hammering away from home. Surprise, surprise, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, I think we got sucked into the position where we basically threw most of our away games. I’m not arguing that we should have done much different- a weakened Sale got hammered at Tigers just after Christmas; a near full strength Wasps did no better a week or two later, but it would have been nice to compete with some of the mid-table sides away from home, and pick up a few losing bonuses. But I don’t think we had the resources to do that latterly.

Then there are the different competitions. The Premiership has to be top priority, because it is the one competition where failure risks complete destruction of the club. We had a very tough Heineken Cup group and, while we rotated the team for fixtures like Toulouse away, we put out strong sides for most games. While we could have recognised the likely reality, that we wouldn’t make it out of the group stages, and saved our key players for the Premiership, that was probably unacceptable. Can you imagine the moaning on this board if we’d done that, or how you’d explain to our first choice players that you weren’t risking them in the Heineken? So, realistically, Kingsley did the only thing he could do, and we paid a price with Sherri’s season-ending injury in October. Where I do perhaps query our approach is in the LV= Cup. That was perhaps an opportunity to play the next generation, especially after we’d lost to a young and inexperienced, but fearless, Dragons side (was this complacency? I’ll talk about that later).  But no, we didn’t take that opportunity so that much the same players clocked up a bit more unnecessary mileage.

 

The Players.

If you look at the quality in our squad, you see current internationals, stars in the making, and big names from a few years ago, and you have to ask “How on Earth did that lot end up scrabbling to finish 11^th?”. Well, if you take out some of the internationals (most obviously Sherri through injury; Cueto and Tait for England), and lose some of the others (Charlie, Jonesy, Tuilagi, Gaskell, Bell, Thomas) to injury, then the season rapidly becomes a test of quality in depth and that’s perhaps one area where we have been found wanting this season, particularly in the threequarters. I have nothing against Jonny Kennedy, David Bishop or Dafydd James, but their names on the teamsheet probably don’t get the opposition thinking “Oh b******s, they’re playing today”, and I think you could see a sharper cutting edge when we fielded the likes of Tait, Thomas and Cueto. In the Premiership, where the margins are fine, that was enough to cost us dear. Similarly, up front, once we got beyond Eifion, Forster and Sherri, we seemed to struggle.

There’s been a lot on the board about “Why not use the younger players?”. Well, why not indeed? Some have clearly adjusted well to the pace and pressure of the Premiership. The emergence of Carl Fearns has continued successfully, and James Gaskell is a real find. Martin Halsall and Lee Imiolek handled things OK, whereas Rob O’Donnell seemed to find life a bit difficult. So what would have happened if we’d relied more on the young players? Well, early on, it might not have made too much difference, but later, when we were starting to look depleted, we were also scratching around down near the bottom of the table, and playing them in those pressurised circumstances would have been a massive risk and a Hellish baptism of fire. So, in my view, that would have been asking far too much. Good call, Kingsley.  

With 20:20 hindsight, maybe our squad was rather too brittle. A first choice team would be a match for any GP side but maybe we turned out to have a bit of a soft underbelly. Obviously, with the salary cap, the squad has to be a compromise between quality and depth, and maybe there is a Sale effect, which means our salary cap doesn’t stretch as far as some other clubs, and maybe we were unlucky with injuries, partiularly in the backline…. On the other hand, we know centre is an attritional position, and I do wonder if our tactics (over? reliance on bosh in attack, and allowing the attackers to come on to us at speed in defence) mean that our injury rate is higher than some, so should we have seen this coming?

 

How We Play. 

We started the season, as many sides seemed to, cautiously, treating the ball as if it was radioactive, and kicking away possession in the hope that the other lot would make a mistake and we could the kick the resulting penalty. But, barring one or two games, we seemed to have an ineffective chasing game, so all that happened was the ball came back at pace (less “kick and clap”; more “kick and howl in frustration”). Or maybe there was more to it than that but, if so, it totally escaped me and everyone else around me (in fact, I am prepared to offer a suitable, liquid reward to anyone who can explain the thinking behind our kicking game this season convincingly).

By the time the powers that be realised their instructions to referees had turned rugby into something less exciting than watching the grass on the EP pitch grow, and changed things, we were near the bottom of the table, struggling to put out a decent side, and we couldn’t take advantage. So, where the likes of Saracens, who like us started the season kicking Hell out of the ball,  ended the season scoring tries for fun, we were neither psychologically nor physically capable of making the switch. Rather, when the heat came on, we were prone to regressing to an aimless kicking game right up to the end of the season.

I also feel there have sometimes been questions over motivation, not just this season, but in previous ones too. Maybe we are complacent; I don’t know? But far too often this season, I have had the sense that we have produced sullen rugby, watched by a sullen crowd.

Personally, I think there is also a further, deeper-rooted, historical reason why we struggle to use possession. If you look right back through the PSA era, we have played a very forward-oriented game with one or two notable exceptions like the GP final. Even in our most successful season, we won matches with forward power and a few moments of individual brilliance from quality backs. The disastrous year after the GP win, Mark Nelson, the backs coach, paid the price and we have since had Jos and Jason, both sublime talents but inexperienced coaches, whose effectiveness has not been clear. So, with five or more years of neglect, and perhaps a diminution of player quality, it’s not really reasonable to expect our backs suddenly to click into gear.

 

The Outcome.

Well, after this whingeathon, I think there are actually some positives. We did survive, and we have given ourselves such a fright that we recognise we have to make changes. If we’d bumbled along and finished 8^th or 9^th, we’d have probably thought “OK, not great, but it’s a rebuilding season”, and not changed anything. Our near-disaster has forced us to look at ourselves honestly.

Some of the home games in the relegation dogfight were gripping, so we certainly got a good dose of excitement- maybe mid-table mediocrity would have been easier on the blood pressure, but it was certainly stimulating.

Also, we have seen some real character from many of the players- the emergence of Gaskell and Fearns, Ormsby finally making a comeback and starting to look again like the real deal, the never-say-die attitude of Briggsy, Charlie’s calm under pressure, and Eifion’s graft week after week after week. I’m sure I’ve missed some of our other heroes, but hopefully they won’t be offended.