Watching some matches over the holidays, I was disappointed with the amount of times players took the ball standing still and passed onto someone else (often in a worse position) without engaging the defence. When we consider the principles of the game: Go Forward, with Support, to maintain Continuity and Pressure, it baffles me that seasoned professionals ignore this. Even with highly organized and intense defences, there are plenty of examples out there of teams playing flatter, moving before the pass, and having multiple options off the initial receiver, yet many teams are forgetting this ..read more

This is the second post related to my quest to simplify what I do at training. If you didn’t see the first post, which has activities for attack, follow THIS LINK. A re-cap of the areas for improvement and design principles … Areas for Improvement: Athlete-Centred Their needs … requires assessment; ask them, but provide options (don’t know?) Their wants … open or from a list of choices Representative Percentage of action can be a guide. What do they really need now / for the future? MUST look and feel like the real game: starts, boundaries, numbers, variation, equipment, rules. Pressure, timin ..read more

I set myself a challenge this year of keeping the number of activities I use down to a minimum so we’re not wasting time teaching athletes a new one every few sessions. I think these cover all the bases for novice and experienced players and are adaptable enough to include more or less contact, space, players, etc. Areas for Improvement: Athlete-Centred Their needs … requires assessment; ask them, but provide options (don’t know?) Their wants … open or from a list of choices Representative Percentage of action can be a guide. What do they really need now / for the future? MUST look and feel li ..read more

While watching the recent English women’s premier league match between top two teams Saracens and Harlequins, I got the feeling that there was as much one-out (i.e. scrum half passing to a player who takes the ball into contact) play as there is in the men’s. Here’s the match: Below is my analysis. Hopefully it’s easy to understand… each section is a series of phases with the starting time, and 1., 2., 3., etc. indicating the phase. 1P = first pass, 2P = second pass, and so on. O = offload from contact instead of pass. F and B are forwards and backs respectively, and + / – is whether the play ..read more

Recently, I’ve been wondering if we can simplify the way we approach rugby training. I’ve been an advocate of ‘game-based’ activities for many years now, but am concerned that I use too many different games. With the time needed to teach the nuances of each and for players to get used to the rules (not to mention for both of us to actually learn from them), I probably do waste a lot of time when I could simply rely on just a few really good activities. Now I can understand that those who coach in places with long seasons need to have new and engaging content to maintain attention, but here in ..read more

I listen to a lot of podcasts and a lot of them leave me with one or two things to think about but aren’t worth blogging about as such or because I’ve already commented on the issues. This recent chat between John O’Sullivan from Changing the Game Project and author David Epstein really had me jotting down a flurry of notes (requiring three listens of the interview!). Epstein wrote the fantastic book The Sports Gene that looked at how various people were ‘built’ for their sport, and how sports are getting better at finding people who are best suited for them. His new book, Range (which I have ..read more