This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with size, Saracens and international eligibility…
Send in the battering rams
It was fascinating this week to hear of Eddie Jones opining that his England backs in general were not heavy enough and that the tour to Argentina would be a testing ground for some of the larger of England’s emerging generation.
England’s coach has never been one to follow convention. We’ve enjoyed the most try-scoring Premiership ever this season, with the season’s most lethal finisher, Christian Wade, tipping the scales at a sprightly 86kg. England’s most-lauded current international backs are Eliot Daly and Jonathan Joseph. The current evolution of the game is absolutely towards the nimble and stepping.
And so Jones sets out to unearth and polish behemoths such as London Irish’s Joe Cokanasiga or Northampton’s Harry Mallinder rather than take the cream of the current crop, bemoaning the lack of anyone more than 94kg in England’s current back-line. A strange direction?
Rugby is cyclical. When new laws take effect (the sensible ones anyway) there’s often a season or two with a flurry of tries before defence coaches wisen up to the intricacies and come up with improved systems, usually in the run-up to World Cups.
Right now not much is different: Super Rugby teams are running in tries aplenty while the European domestic leagues have all been top-notch this season for entertainment. Attack and fleet-footedness are very much the dish of the day.
But one thing about rugby never changes: when defences tighten up, size is the ultimate fallback weapon. If it seems strange for Jones to be focussing on the large players we don’t know yet rather than the smaller ones making all the headlines now, it’s because he has an idea of the future direction of the game’s play.
Time will tell if his idea is right or not.
Kings of Europe and team rugby
It’s no stretch of credibility now to insist that everything Saracens have created is everything Mourad Boudjellal must have wished he had spent more time creating in Toulon.
The Kings of Europe twice in a row – and highly likely to retain their Premiership crown as well over the next two weeks – bear many of the hallmarks of dynasty teams such as Alex Ferguson’s United or Bill Belichik’s Patriots. The team comes first.
Unknowns can be recruited or called up and will instantly know their jobs and roles so well that superstars can be created overnight (remember how good Alex Lozowski has been this season).
When the chips are down, these are teams who can conjure stirring fightbacks out of nothing, whose collective will to conquer means there is always another level to be reached, always an improvement to be made. Teams with doubts would have struggled as Clermont moved to within a point on Saturday; Saracens simply got better.
It’s what Toulon, for all their galactico experience and superstar pulling power, never quite managed to create, or more specfiically, sustain; a collective will.
It meant that when one or the other superstar was injured, the replacements were less empowered. It’s why Toulon are enduring as flat a season as you could wish for, but why you can see no sign of Saracens’ domestic and international domination ending.
Three becomes five – will it make a difference?
Last week’s Loose Pass was full of the caveats of the new rules on international eligibility, pointing out with much justification that turning three years into five years of residency qualification would simply mean that promising young talents from far afield would end up being imported younger.
The column also quite rightly pointed the finger at shabby recruitment practices and unscrupulous agents for many a miserable sojourn abroad from a young hopeful.
This week’s Loose Pass can only agree. Five years is a big improvement but it is still not enough. And we’d like to know: what is it that makes eligibility to play international sport different from eligibility for a new passport from your chosen country?
Your correspondent from this week currently resides in Germany, where the international team is well-stuffed with foreign recruits.
But the past couple of years has seen a bit of a shift in the recruitment practice, in that players are now sought who have German family members and can instantly claim German citizenship and/or eligibility on the basis of these. Without the family members, you need to live in Germany for eight years to get a passport.
Eight years or heritage gets you nationality. Why should it be less to get you playing sport for a national team?
Loose Pass compiled by former Planet Rugby Editor Danny Stephens
The post Loose Pass appeared first on Planet Rugby.