On a wing but without a prayer
Peter Jackson finds little to cheer for the speed merchants when it comes to checking the stats from the Autumn Series
As if enough questions have not been provoked by England's broken promise about ‘lighting up Twickenham', here is another on the same theme concerning the speed merchants.
Find the odd man out in this lot from the Autumn Series: Joe Cokanasiga, Jonny May, Jack Nowell, Tommy Freeman. Answer: Cokanasiga, below. He was the only wing to score a try in any of the four matches. The remainder of the ‘finishers' returned a collective zero. Precisely the same judgement can be passed on a different quartet of wings over the course of a month during which Wales did their level worst to monopolise misery.
Find the odd man out here: Alex Cuthbert, Rio Dyer, Louis Rees-Zammit, Josh Adams. Answer: Dyer, above. Like Coagnasiga, he was the only Wales wing to do what wings are meant to do, score tries. In Dyer's case he went one better than his English opposite number and scored twice which was just as well given that the rest fired blanks.
Throughout the year of Test rugby on both sides of the Equator, England and Wales finish with the lowest try strike rate of the ten countries across the Six Nations and the Rugby Championship.
England's total of 27 tries in 12 Tests work out only fractionally above two per match. Wales scored the fewest tries, so few that their average fell below two.
Despite the eruptions over their volcanic home series beating by Ireland, the All Blacks racked up the most tries, aided and abetted, as per usual, by Wales. Eight tries in Cardiff followed the nine they scored there 12 months earlier, nowhere near enough to prevent them finishing a distant third behind France and Ireland. France followed their Grand Slam with five more straight wins, three against Japan. The World Cup hosts only played two of the Southern Hemisphere's traditional Big Three: Australia and South Africa.
Ireland, by contrast, played almost half their matches against the All Blacks (three times), the Springboks and the Wallabies, once each. England and Wales had similar schedules, starting last summer with three each in Australia and South Africa respectively.
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David Flatman's humour sets him apart. Asked to compare a wing's job chasing re-starts with a tighthead's role in the scrum, the occasional England prop who played eight times at the turn of the century told Amazon Prime viewers: “There's no-one trying to fold you up like a deckchair when you're chasing kicks.”
And what the England forwards were thinking about when they waited in the tunnel to lock horns with Argentina: “It was the promise of imminent violence which was on your mind. We were terrified. The game has changed since my day.''
Discipline
When it came to keeping all 15 players on the field throughout the year of Test rugby, nobody did it as well as Ireland. They negotiated their way through the hazards of the Six Nations, a three-Test series in New Zealand and a challenging autumn without anything more damaging than a pair of yellow cards. They played ten minutes with 14 men in the second All Blacks' Test in Dunedin after South African referee Jaco Peyper had sent James Ryan to the bin followed by ten more in Wellington seven days later when Wayne Barnes decreed that Andrew Porter needed to take the same break.
That apart, Ireland managed to avoid falling foul of any referee anywhere else. Their collective discipline survived perhaps the most severe examination in the last match against the Wallabies who went toe-to-toe without quite Going The Biff as their ancestors used to do in both codes.
The price of indiscipline has rarely been as exorbitant as it proved during the last four weeks. Argentina played at Murrayfield for 57 minutes with 14 men, 11 minutes with 13 and ten minutes with 12, inviting Scotland to make them pay to the tune of eight tries and 50-plus points. Two late Welsh sin-binnings last week accelerated an implosion which obliterated a 21-point advantage and turned into a five-point beating during the last 21 minutes. That Australia were able to inflict it with a mixture of 2nd and 3rd XV players made it all the harder for the hosts to bear.
