Looking back at this weekend’s proceedings at Twickenham against New Zealand, the big talking point was Steve Borthwick’s substitution strategy, sending on a string of substitutes in a match where England were on top.
Now I fully understand the need to properly use data to inform rugby decisions, but using it in isolation and relying entirely on it is foolhardy coaching.
Coaches have live data streaming via Sportscode and other apps at all times. They measure fitness and fatigue in real time, they have detailed statistics on interventions, tackles and all sorts of aspects of the match, but using these in isolation is incredibly dangerous.
England’s The biggest data takeaway is in their last ten Tier 1 test matches they are averaging 3 points in the last 20 minutes of the game. In each of those Tests, England were ahead at the 60-minute mark, yet only closed out half of them, and in every case outside of the Ireland game last year, those games were against teams ranked lower than themselves.
When you read the data in detail, England have averaged 5.5 substitutions in recent quarters, so something has to say that the strategy is simply NOT working. In fact, it could be argued that against New Zealand three times and South Africa once, that strategy took the momentum away. So why does England slavishly continue with it?
Different resources
When South Africa, Ireland or New Zealand unload their benches, they tend to have players in place who enhance the situation; proven, hardened test athletes with significant ability to shift up the tempo. Now, Borthwick clearly said after the game that when you have a player of George Ford’s quality on your bench, then you have to use him – but is that really the case?
Are Nick Isiekwe, Theo Dan, Fin Baxter, Harry Randall and Ben Curry really better players than the men they replaced? Sure, they might have energy in their legs, but they don’t have the ownership of the game going on, they take time to get going, and in the case of the players I listed, there’s a decline in both experience and quality, so I just can’t follow a predetermined plan that is demonstrably NOT working based on the previous ten tests.
Sending cold players into hot situations is an exercise that fails more often than not. How many times have you seen a new whore being introduced with a key toss, only for him to fluff his lines because he just doesn’t have the momentum and isn’t hot enough to complete his discipline.
I understand why Borthwick would send George Ford on, but objectively George hadn’t played a real game this season and Marcus Smith delivered a match-winning performance. A substitution decision cost England the result, but it will also dent Smith’s confidence in his impact and his 60 minutes of brilliance. Better keep him, let him own the result and learn from the experience for the next World Cup when we might need him to finish a tight knockout game.
Analysts will give you the fatigue argument, but it’s one that needs to be carefully considered. A three minute injury stop can have a really positive impact on the tired; there are players – like Tom Curry, Ellis Genge and Jamie George to name a few – who have huge personal moments in games and to take away that ability is dangerous.
How to watch England v Australia at Twickenham: TV channel, live stream, kick-off time
History
Relying on data means using history to make decisions. The information, by definition, lives in the past and it does not look at the potential of the moment or the flow of the game at that time.
It’s all about feeling – combining objective data with the subjective feeling of the coaches and players about what’s happening in front of them – and right now England are not balancing this equation properly, with an over-reliance on stat-driven pre-planning over an intuitive sense of the match situation . Simply put, eyes and feel tell more than a spreadsheet of numbers – if it didn’t, you might as well play fifteen pocket calculators against each other.
Now, don’t get me wrong – data used properly is incredibly beneficial. The strong coach uses it to inform his intuition – just the way Rassie Erasmus and the Springboks use it. But the weak manager is using it to mitigate failures, and I worry that is the way England are headed if they don’t start responding to the game situation in addition to the data situation.
Change in rugby, just in life, has to be for the better. For England, we know that in the last ten Tests our changes have not been for the better and unless our coaches can turn their minds around we will continue to fall off in the last 20 as we probably have.
So my message is clear – get experienced impact players on the bench, use them wisely, but above all, do it according to what is happening on the field, not on the laptop screen.
