Coach Defends Jonny Wilkinson
Coach defends Jonny Wilkinson despite his dismal performance against Italy.
England manager Martin Johnson has rounded on Jonny Wilkinson’s critics, accusing the fly-half’s detractors of having “their own agenda”.
Wilkinson’s position at stand-off came under scrutiny following England’s lacklustre 17-12 Six Nations victory away to perennial wooden spoon contenders Italy on Sunday.
Goalkicking, which even Wilkinson’s fiercest critics agree is the strongest part of his game, let the outside-half down with the No 10, who plays for French club Toulon, surprisingly missing three of his place kicks at the posts.
Former scrum-half Matt Dawson, who played alongside Wilkinson in the England team that won the 2003 World Cup, was scathing, saying, “What is missing in his repertoire is an ability to read the game, understand where England are playing and where they should be playing.”
Johnson, England’s 2003 World Cup winning captain, insisted no player was immune from being dropped but said the team as a whole had to take the blame for a deeply uninspiring display in Rome.
“I don’t agree with the criticism,” Johnson said.
“Jonny missed a few kicks and suddenly everyone is calling for his head, which I find pretty disappointing and surprising.
“No-one is undroppable, no-one ever has been. But is it Jonny’s fault we didn’t convert our line breaks? No, it’s a team thing.”
“It has become the vogue to have a pop at Jonny. It is not always right or fair and I think some people are using it for their own agenda but that is the world we live in.”
Jonny Wilkinson and Assistant Coach Jon Callard during the England training session.
The 30-year-old Wilkinson, Test rugby’s record points scorer, has only twice been axed by England, for Paul Grayson at the 1999 World Cup and for the now out-of-favour Danny Cipriani during the 2008 Six Nations.
But Johnson’s decision to release back-up fly-half Toby Flood, the only unused replacement against Italy, for club duty with Leicester this weekend, does not suggest England are contemplating a change at fly-half.
Wilkinson, capped 75 times by England, has arguably the best defence of any fly-half to have played international rugby and Johnson said players had to be looked at in the round.
“You have players who are not in the team who are potentially better at some areas of the game than guys that are in the team. You have to weigh up that overall impact,” Johnson added.
“I think Toby has been playing well. We are lucky to have two world-class players at 10.”
England, for all they talked about playing an attacking game against Italy, found themselves repeatedly drawn into dead-end kicking exchanges.
“This match highlighted again that he (Wilkinson) is not comfortable with the responsibility of being the team’s playmaker,” Dawson wrote.
“He can play in the way that has been planned on a flip chart in team meetings but if it comes down to him to work out on the hoof what options to take, more often than not he will kick and miss opportunities to attack.
“Jonny needs players around him, guys like Mike Catt, Will Greenwood, myself or Kyran Bracken, to take decisions, then he will execute them brilliantly.”
Wilkinson has made clear how much he values having an experienced player near him to direct operations and when Johnson was England captain always deflected any praise that came his way towards the likes of Greenwood and Catt.
Now Johnson has told scrum-half Danny Care and inside centre Riki Flutey to help shoulder the creative burden.
“We are not playing in isolation out there and that is something we will stress,” said Johnson. “Danny Care is improving all the time in that position and Riki was back for his first game at this level in six or seven months.
Courtesy of Sporting Life
HAVE YOUR SAY: Are the fans and critics being to harsh on him or is he pulling the team down?
Ditch Jonny, Save Yourselves
Jonny Wilkinson Has Not Helped England's Awful Ways
If you’re England, it’s probably beginning to feel like you’ve just rolled over and continued a bad rugby nightmare. A narrow win over Italy has done little to quell fears of complete collapse – as this insightful piece from the UK Guardian shows:
Everything is relative. Thank goodness we can all sit around debating how awful England were, rather than await a chilling medical bulletin from a Cardiff hospital. Let us be eternally grateful that the Scotland wing Thom Evans did not, after all, suffer a more serious injury at the Millennium Stadium. Were he still lying motionless in bed with no feeling in his arms and legs, England’s shortcomings in Rome would be less than irrelevant.
Happily the medics say Evans should make a full recovery. Unhappily for Martin Johnson, the Six Nations Championship table may imply a blooming red rose but anyone who watched the 80-minute bore-athon in the Stadio Flaminio knows better.
Subtract Welsh generosity and Italian mediocrity from the equation and England could easily still be searching for their first win.
Maybe it would have done them good to lose to the Azzurri on Sunday, if only to inject more realism into the post-match platitudes. Maybe, behind closed doors this week, tough words will be spoken and even tougher decisions taken.
As things stand, though, England risk the steepest of descents. Even if they do emerge from their weekend torpor to see off Ireland and Scotland, they face a total wipeout at the hands of a resurgent France in Paris unless there is a radical change of tactics.
Should England finish second in the championship playing like zombies, it will confirm every southern hemisphere doubt about the tournament’s overall quality.
Sure, it did Johnson no favours that the Wales-Scotland game was such a humdinger or that France made such mincemeat of the grand slam champions. The snapshot of the Six Nations so far was Mathieu Bastareaud’s offload out of Brian O’Driscoll’s tackle for Clément Poitrenaud’s try. Talk about the changing of the guard.
Yet anyone who witnessed the Scots playing with massive precision, pride and passion, albeit without ultimate reward, could not fail to wonder why England seem incapable of doing likewise on a consistent basis. Dan Parks, the much-maligned Glasgow fly-half, had the game of his life while the so-called Killer Bs – Brown, Beattie and Barclay – were similarly outstanding.
The difference was that Scotland were brimful of intent and purpose while England again spent a large chunk of their 80 minutes painting by numbers.
To blame it all on Jonny Wilkinson would be harsh. He has bailed out his country around the world and his late drop goal on Sunday did so again. Slow ball can also make mortals of the greatest playmakers. Sometimes, though, you just wish the coaches would temporarily hand the goalkicking duties to someone else and tell Wilkinson enough is enough.
Either play flat on the gainline and take responsibility for putting your midfield into space, or accept the consequences at the next selection meeting. If the great man is merely playing to orders, rip them up and start again. If he cannot – or will not – take that giant leap of the imagination, it is time for someone else – Toby Flood? Shane Geraghty? Charlie Hodgson? Danny Cipriani? – to start at No10.
It is no good, either, wibbling on about lingering stomach bugs. If people were not fully fit, they should not have been starting. England’s issue is not physical but psychological. They talk a lot about freedom but play with the zest of men serving a life sentence.
A lot of visiting teams struggle to break down Italy but at least they set off with clear conviction. When opponents do not gift them points, England look painfully short of ideas and, as a direct result, invite trouble upon themselves.
Where are the forwards queuing up, like Beattie and Brown, to storm the gainline? Apart from Nick Easter and Simon Shaw, neither of whom is a spring chicken, there remains scant ball-carrying oomph beyond the set pieces.
Dan Cole is still settling into Test rugby but Lewis Moody, for all his selfless commitment and restart gymnastics, is not a creative openside in the mould of Martyn Williams. Without any momentum, Danny Care is effectively neutered and Wilkinson is even more inclined to retreat back into the pocket.
This, in turn, renders England predictable in attack and overreliant on the boot. It might win them the odd Six Nations dogfight but not a World Cup next year.
The missing ingredient, in short, is dynamism. It comes in many forms, not least leadership. If England really meant all that stuff about allowing players freedom of expression they have to replace words with action. If they risk defeat in pursuit of greater self-knowledge, so be it.
When Nick Mallett spoke of disappointment in Italy’s dressing room at not having beaten England, he was simply stating the obvious.
There will be further trouble ahead unless Johnson’s men heed such warnings. Perhaps England should reflect on the misfortune of Evans, a good friend of James Haskell’s, and remind themselves that life is not a rehearsal. Armed with a fresh perspective, they might just feel empowered to ditch their negative ways and spectacularly sidestep their critics.
With thanks to The Guardian
How Backs Are Getting Bigger
- French Back Bastareaud
Nothing in sport, not even Tiger Woods’s ego, has expanded as rapidly in volume over the past two decades as the average rugby player.
Once there was room on the field of play for the svelte and the tubby, but nowadays it is filled with towering, muscular beasts whose heads disappear directly into their shoulders without the intervention of anything so namby-pamby as a neck.
On stumbling across a Six Nations match anyone unfamiliar with rugby union would conclude that they were watching a Stonehenge lookalike contest. The late Bill McClaren routinely described large second-row forwards as “powerhouses”.
Nowadays even the backs are the size of nuclear reactors.
“Where did Mathew Tait get them thighs from?” a guy said to me on Saturday night.
He sounded like somebody asking about a stylish jacket that had caught his eye. But then, the idea that somewhere in Twickenham there is a big room with racks of giant pectorals, biceps, abs and quads and a group of skilled technicians busily bolting them on to the squad like ground crews arming an F1-11 hardly seems beyond the realms of possibility.
By the time a player has been in the England squad for a couple of months he’s more or less bound to look like he’s been inflated with a foot pump. The day of the first armour-plated prop with integral turbo-booster is surely not far away.
My old geography teacher was forever showing us slides of topographical features and saying, “A typical terminal moraine, and that’s my wife in the corner there for scale”. He did this so often that the feeling grew among us that the only photos of Mrs Geography Master that existed showed her smiling wanly beside some gigantic erosional landform. Even the couple’s wedding photos, we reckoned, probably showed them posed, diminutively, next to a drumlin.
When seen sporting among their fellows the vastness of the new breed of rugby stars is – like that of the landscape – not immediately obvious.
In order fully to appreciate their immensity it is necessary to see them with a normal person placed – Mrs Geography Master-style – alongside. The effects of this can be witnessed on the BBC where Sonya McLaughlin generally finds herself standing on the touchline beside a couple of vast brutes with the sort of flattened features that suggest they are wearing stocking masks.
The difference in size between McLaughlin and the two monoliths next to her is so great it creates the impression that the blonde Scot is far off in the distance.
So powerful is this optical illusion that at times you feel certain she will have to ask her questions about just how vitally important the breakdown is going to be by shouting through a megaphone, or signalling with flags.
One man who doesn’t require any help in convincing us of his ample proportions is Mathieu Bastareaud.
We have only to watch him in action. When Bastareaud rampages forward would-be tacklers hang off the back of him, bouncing along the ground like tin cans trailing behind a newlywed couple’s Ford Focus. The 107 KG Stade Français juggernaut has cheek muscles the size of most blokes’ calves.
I bet his spit could demolish a coal bunker.
Why the Change?
The employment of Bastareaud marks something of a departure for France. While England teams have tended in recent times to concentrate on the three aitches (or, as BBC pundit Raphaël Ibanez prefers to think of it, the three apostrophes) of hugeness, hits and ham-fistedness, the French approach to the game has always been more subtle and intellectual, usually relying on the ability of their players to gradually wear opponents down by repeated declarations of the superiority of their own lifestyle over that of all other nations.
This has proved particularly effective in the intimate confines of the scrum where after 65 minutes of listening to the whispering about the TGV, Périgord truffles and the scent of Catherine Deneuve’s hair even hard men like Brian Moore have lost the will to fight.
Stopping Bastareaud will be the key to beating the French, but how to go about it? The Scots showed that brute force is useless. Shouting, clapping and whistling whenever he gets the ball in the hope that the loud noise will confuse him, causing him to run in the wrong direction, is one possibility; employing a cunning defensive cover of maths questions and tickling another.
So far the only thing that has successfully brought the 21-year-old from Créteil down is a New Zealand hotel table, but even Martin Johnson will surely balk at picking anything as inanimate as that.
In the end the best hope for the home nations is surely to put their trust in the maverick France coach, Marc Lièvremont. Lièvremont wears polo-neck sweaters and glasses and generally looks like one of those spiffy French philosophers who spend their time arguing persuasively that they don’t exist, while running around bedding film stars.
Last week he told this newspaper that in the Six Nations, “Our biggest rival is the France team itself”. The France coach was surely being unduly modest, since he seems more capable of derailing his side than even his players are. He is a contrarian by nature.
If enough people express the view that France’s best weapon is the mighty centre Bastareaud, then Lièvremont will, in all likelihood, drop him immediately. Well, I’ve done my bit.
With thanks to The Guardian
Animal Magic of Richie McCaw Offers Lesson To Six Nations
Richie McCaw remains the world's best
Ian McGeechan calls them “Test match animals”. According to Sir Ian, and he’s identified a few in his time, they are a special breed of rugby player. As the demands get greater they get better. From club rugby, to the leagues, on to European competition and then to internationals … with every step up they go up a notch.
It’s not just a talent thing. There are plenty of guys who have bags of talent but fall short. The ones that matter have the full package. Talent, skill, fitness, and athleticism almost go unsaid. It’s the brain that adds the extra. The mind to fit the occasion.
Look at Richie McCaw, the All Blacks captain, twice world player of the year and a near-perfect example of Sir Ian’s Test match animal. Even the casual spectator has to be impressed by his all-action style of play – the number of tackles he makes, how often he’s involved in attacks and the number of times he gets his hands on the ball. However, it’s when you look a little deeper that you begin to understand the real value of the man to his team.
Even in those mad moments at the breakdown, he has a cold eye. To see him tackle, get back to his feet and then either strip the ball from an opponent or, in all probability, win a penalty for holding on is one of those magic moments in the game. But even that is not the end of it.
McCaw, more than anyone I can think of, lives as close to the line of legality as possible. Some referees think he steps over it and there are times when the amount of ball he wins has to be weighed against the penalties he concedes. I said penalties not points, because McCaw has that happy knack, an extra sense if you like, only to transgress (or almost only) when the penalty is safely out of range of the opposition’s goal-kicker.
However, most of the time McCaw seems to have an in-built ability to know just how far he can go. When he’s penalised you can almost see him rethink his approach. It’s a bit like recalibrating an instrument or an engineering tool. Add a millimetre here, take away a fraction of an inch there. When he’s satisfied that the referee is satisfied, then it’s back into those parts of the game that often go unseen by the fan on the terrace or in the stand.
So we have the near-perfect example of a Test match animal and I hope there will be plenty around this weekend at Murrayfield, Croke Park and especially Twickenham, where England take on Wales in the best possible match-up at the start of a Six Nations. As an Englishman I obviously have a foot in both camps, but even before I started coaching with Wales, even before I switched codes and began working in rugby union, I always understood that England versus Wales – it didn’t matter whether it was in Cardiff or London – was a bit special. After two years coaching in the Six Nations I now know how special.
Merely thinking about it brings me out in a sweat and this is where Sir Ian’s man comes in. Looking at Martin Johnson’s side, with the speedy Mathew Tait chosen ahead of Dan Hipkiss or Shontayne Hape at outside-centre, and such men as Ugo Monye and Delon Armitage in the back three, it’s obvious that England have changed tack a little and are going for pace whereas Wales are, perhaps, more settled.
However, looking at the teams in isolation, examining two bits of paper doesn’t tell half the story. International rugby is not called a Test for nothing. At the most obvious level it’s a test of skills – passing, running, kicking, scrummaging, leaping in the lineout, catching the high ball – and fitness – doing it all for 80 minutes, the last 20 probably on wobbly legs if you have been scrummaging, rucking and mauling all afternoon.
But on another, less understood and less fashionable level, it’s also a test of manhood, being prepared to put yourself where “normal” people wouldn’t go. And doing it with a clear head.
Aggression is fine, but if that alone was enough, then we might as well pick a bunch of bouncers or dancehall doormen, guys who like a rumble. Winning Test rugby demands more – guys who can stay cool during the mayhem, players who keep their wits about them when all around seems madness.
With thanks to The Guardian
Rebels Chase The Big Guns
England's Danny Cipriani might just be heading Down Under.
The newest Super Rugby franchise – the Melbourne Rebels – are already on a big recruitment drive for their Super 15 debut in 2011.
Headed up by coaching director Rod Macqueen, the Melbourne Rebels are determined to have a squad able to contest for the title when the tournament starts next year – and their first target is young England flyhalf Danny Cipriani.
The 21-year-old Cipriani held talks in London last week with representatives from the Rebels. His contract with current side London Wasps ends in May, and the young star, whose England prospects have been faltering since Martin Johnson took over the side, might just be up for a new challenge – especially if it is a lucrative one.
Macqueen is keen to sign up at least 10 overseas players for his Melbourne Rebels, and has sent former Australian and Bath head coach John Connelly overseas to scout the interest and availability of certain players. The Melbourne-based franchise have AUS$10-million to spend on recruiting a squad.
Another factor to throw in the mix is Cipriani’s celebrity girlfriend, model Kelly Brook, although reports suggest she is keen to move to Australia.
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