What Auckland Team Learnt hi The South

Greymouth Evening Star, 27 September 1947, Page 4

What Auckland Team Learnt hi The South

“The term ‘loose scrum’ is the greatest misnomer in Rugby football’,’ said Mr V. C. Butler, chairman of the Auckland Rugby Union’s selection committee, in an address to about 40 club coaches on his experiences as coach of the Auckland repi;esentative team during its ' South Island tour. The address was arranged by the union so that lessons of the tour could be circulated among the Auckland clubs.

“The Otago and Southland teams think of a loose scrum as a tight ruck,” said Mr Butler. “As soon as the ball is on the ground the first two men to reach it step over it, the next man goes in low between them as a lock, and the scrum forms up on either a two-three-two or a three-four-one formation principle. Both Southland and Otago are masters of this type of game. They have eight men in the scrum at all times, and there are no strays anywhere.” Art of Tight Rucking Having mastered the art of tight rucking, the Southland and Otago forwards used it following line-outs by putting the ball on the ground quickly and rucking it back. To do this the man taking the ball immediately turned sideways in the line-out, slipped .the ball back under his arm and at the same time pushed toward the opposition’s goal line. “We did not once see the ball passed back from a line-out,” said Mr Butler. “The forwards' caught -the ball, put it on the ground as qdickly as posible and rucked it back. This forced our forwards to join the scrum or else have the ball, carried through them.”

The backs in the South Island conr centrated on quick passing to get the ball to their wings, continued •Mr

Butler. They would make perhaps 20yds from a passing rush, win the ball from a ruck and gain another 20yds. It was a good team that could keep its position on defence following three quick movements such as that. The Key Man Mr Butler maintained that the key man in any back line was the first five-eighths. He was close to the scrum, where there were ten of the opposing players, and it was his duty to get the ball clear of this concentrated defence as quickly as possible. If each back took the ball on one foot and passed it on the next, two feet in front of his outside man, so as to mgke him spurt To take it, speed would develop with the passing movement until the ball reached the wing, where the defence was thinnest and the attacking side had its fastest men. “The South Island teams lay great stress on good positional play and generate speed in their back attacks by quick, accurate passing all along the . line. They play orthodox football and it pays,” said Mr Butler. “Auckland footballers are as good as those in the south, but to win the Ranfurly Shield back we have got to develop tight rucking forwards and sound positional play and quick passing among the backs. We have got to eliminate a certain ‘flashiness’ which has crept into Auckland football and get back to the reliability which was a feature of ’the old type of game.”

Stopwatch Statistics Prove Revealing

The Rugby public which believed that it saw 80 minutes of play in the Auckland representatives matches staged on the last two Saturdays against Hawke’s Bay and Wellington was severely deceived, writes a corn respondent of the New Zealand Herald. In the match against Hawke’s Bay it saw the ball actually in play for 38 minutes of the game. Against Wellington tHe ball was actually in

play for 37 minutes. These somewhat astonishing statistics were collected by means of a stopwatch and a tally of every infringement or hold-up which occur-* red in the two games. They show that on the average every lineout took 10 seconds to form and every scrum 15. A penalty kick might waste anything from five seconds, in the case of a simple kick for touch, to 45 seconds for R. W. H. Scott, the fullback, to place the ball and take his run. The conversion of a try took even longer and averaged between 40 and 50 seconds.

Against Hawke’s Bay the hold-ups absorbed more than 19 minutes in the first spell and more than 23 in the second. Against Wellington, the first spell hold-ups cost 16min 25sec and the second 26min 35sec.

All sorts of points not intended by this report and including excessive whistle, waste of time by players and so on, might be read,into the-.statis-tics. The two games, however, were fast. The infringements, apart perhaps from a tendency for too much kicking into touch, were not noticeable fin the course of the games. Perhaps the one real lesson taught by the stopwatch is that Rugby is too hard a game for continuous effort throughout 80 minutes.