Waratahs seek new approach to try to fix leaky defence
Daryl Gibson is breaking the mould by hiring a Welshman as his defensive coach for the Waratahs but he says he needs a radical approach because their tackling isn’t up to scratch.
By his own admission, the Waratahs head coach Daryl Gibson is a bit of a stats geek.
He loves crunching the numbers to see what’s working and what’s not but one piece of raw data from the Super Rugby season that’s just finished has given him nightmares and forced him to take drastic action.
Although the Waratahs won the Australian conference and went on to reach the semi-finals, they gave up 67 tries during the process. The only team with a worse defensive record were the struggling Sunwolves.
There’s plenty of good defensive coaches in Australia but Gibson believes the problems with his Waratahs are more mental than physical so he decided for a more radical philosophical approach.
So he’s done what might once have been unthinkable and hired a Welshman as his new assistant coach in the belief that Australian players could learn a thing or two about how to tackle though the northern hemisphere’s approach to defence.
“There’s other ways to play rugby and that’s something you often forget when you're ensconced in one way of doing things,” Gibson told The Daily Telegraph.
“There’s probably a sense of romanticism here around how the game used to be played. There’s a philosophy that people want to see running rugby but there’s always a pragmatic winning side to that.”
That’s Gibson’s polite way of saying that the Waratahs need to toughen up defensively, which is why he’s gone for someone from the other side of the world and recruited Steve Tandy, formerly the head coach of Ospreys, one of the four professional teams in Wales.
Because they play 11 months of the year, often in foul weather, defence is paramount in Wales, as the Wallabies discovered earlier this month in their 9-6 loss, and Tandy thinks there’s some valuable lessons the Waratahs could learn.
“Things are geared up differently here. The mindset is different and how they want to play the game is different,” Tandy told The Daily Telegraph.
“Southern hemisphere teams are always better than the northern hemisphere teams when they've got the football.
“But back home, because of the wet weather conditions and the way some of the competitions are structured, it's about territory and how we do that through a kicking game defence.”
The trick for Tandy is trying to find the right balance. The defensive patterns that work in Wales can’t be exactly replicated in Super Rugby because the playing conditions are so different.
The full Super Rugby season lasts less than five months and because most of the matches are played on dry fields, the emphasis will always be on attack and playing the game at breakneck speed so he knows he can’t detract from the attack to plug the holes in defence.
“That’s obviously the way the Waratahs play so when you attack like that, you’re always going to concede tries,” Tandy said.
“So for me, it’s just about growing different systems and hopefully make us harder to break down and ultimately complement the attack.
“It’s not to change our attack and the way we play, it’s hopefully to complement it when we haven’t got the ball and just make a little more difficult about how we get broken down.”
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