Tour sidelights...

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32636, 18 June 1971, Page 20

Tour sidelights...

AN EYE ON THE GAME An intensive study of possession figures from every match on the tour is helping the Lions improve their playing pattern. All the Lions not engaged as players or reserves are put to work keeping detailed statistics from the elementary things, such as line-out and scrum possession, to the more subtle study of the number of times the ball is carried across the gain line and what happens to it after that. “If only one small thing emerges from each match it is worth while,” said the team’s coach and taskmaster in this exercise, Mr C. R. James, yesterday. “One quite fascinating thing has emerged from this study—l will tell you about it in about a week’s time,” he said. “I try to get each player to concentrate—when he is a spectator on . particular points of his own play.” Mr James gets his props to concentrate on the scrums, the locks to study the lineouts, the flankers to observe the rucks, the wings to note how many passes the threequarters receive and how many are dropped, the fullbacks to give detailed accounts of penalties, and so on.

After the match he gathers this fund of information, and studies it intently. He finds

the figures give him a complete analytical break-down of the match, and illustrate the effectiveness of particular points of the Lions’ game. GOOD, KEEN MEN Most of the good, keen men of Rugby these days appear to live in Harihari, on the West Coast. Members of the Harihari senior Rugby team, which is lying second in the Coast competition, have asked the West Coast Rugby Union if they may play their match tomorrow at 9 a.m. Their aim is to clean up quickly after the game, and drive across the Southern Alps to Christchurch to watch the Lions p'ay Canterbury. Then they plan to drive home again. FRANZ JOSEF TRIP Pictures of Cape Town’s Table Mountain and South Westland’s Franz Josef Glacier would form a colourful contrast in a tourist brochure—but the Lions’ lock, W. J. Mcßride, has gone one better by capturing both these notable natural attractions on one film.

He photographed Table Mountain while on the Lions’ tour of South Africa in 1968 and, with the same film still in his camera, took pictures of the glacier during the touring team’s South Westland trip this week.