杏吧原创

鈥淭HE Aussies are coming.鈥� The cry is enough to send a shudder down the spines of players in the other nine nations competing in the Rugby League World Cup. When the tournament kicks off next week at Wembley stadium in London, the men in the famous green and gold shirts will have been world champions since 1975, the year they won the first of four consecutive titles. And everyone thinks they will win again.

They seem unbeatable even though, on paper, at least three other national squads 鈥� England, Wales and New Zealand 鈥� can match them man-for-man in terms of speed, playing skills, physique and experience. Over the past decade, rival coaches have scrutinised the Australian game, collected and analysed statistical data, and drawn up training programmes to ensure that their teams mimic the way Australians play rugby league. To little avail, however. Losing margins have narrowed, but Australia remains invincible.

Collision course

Now a British scientist is convinced he knows why. The secret of Australia鈥檚 success, says Andy Clarke, an exercise physiologist from the Human Performance Laboratory at Fairfield Hospital in Merseyside, is the way the team exploits the many occasions in a game when players with the ball are tackled, fall to the ground, stand up again and bring the ball back into play. Traditionally, coaches dismiss this process, which Clarke terms 鈥渢he collision鈥�, as lost time. 鈥淭he collision is regarded as a break between points scoring activities, and coaches look only for the tackle to be completed successfully,鈥� he says. But Clarke has found that what happens during the collision is crucial to the outcome of a game 鈥� and, so far, only the Australians seem to be making the most of the process. Bob Fulton, the Australian national coach, is understandably cagey about his tactics and methods so close to the world cup kickoff, but colleagues confirmed that the team is indeed trained to exploit the collision.

Clarke began his study in 1992 when the Rugby Football League, the sport鈥檚 governing body in Britain, asked him to work out just what made the Australian players so unbeatable. Australia had just defeated Great Britain in their biennial tournament, the Ashes, for the 10th successive time, and the RFL was under great pressure to discover why.

This was not the first time that the RFL had turned to science for help. In the mid-1980s, the league used an established method of systematic observation, known as notational analysis, (see 鈥淪oftware route to success鈥�) to quantify the differences between the two sides in terms of such factors as tackles, passes, kicks, errors committed, penalties conceded and fitness. All this information provided the basis for new training programmes for British players, who were urged to match the statistical performance of their Australian counterparts. But notational analysis was never meant to be used at face value, without an appreciation of the underlying reasons for a team鈥檚 success, says Tom Reilly, professor of sports science at Liverpool John Moores University. Put simply, he notes, statistics might show that Australia won a game after holding onto the ball for 58 per cent of the match and making 304 passes: 鈥淏ut matching that performance in your own half is not going to get you anywhere,鈥� he says. 鈥淯nless you use your possession and passes correctly, you still lose.鈥� Clarke鈥檚 discovery has its origins in notational analysis but takes the statistical approach a step further.

Before collating the usual data and analysing it, Clarke quizzed Britain鈥檚 top 40 players and was astonished by the answers he got to one question in particular: which area of the game causes you most fatigue? 鈥淚 expected them to cite actions like sprinting with the ball, running backwards into the defensive line and chasing kicks.鈥� Instead, nearly 80 per cent listed 鈥渢ackling鈥� and, more surprising, 鈥渂eing tackled鈥�. What鈥檚 more, only 9 per cent of the top players thought that coaches understood what caused their fatigue. Too few coaches, it seems, share the view of John Monie, the former Wigan coach, who likens rugby league collisions to 鈥渂eing mugged 30 times in 80 minutes鈥�. During his reign at Wigan, Monie steered the club side through the most successful period in its history. Such revelations led Clarke to examine collisions in the game very closely.

Rugby league is an invasive game, in the parlance of sports science. One team invades the other鈥檚 territory, passing and kicking the ball at speed as it tries to move deeper into that territory to score, points. A team wins 4 points when it carries the ball over the opposition鈥檚 goal line, and 1 or 2 points when it kicks the ball between the two upright posts on the goal line. Defenders try to halt an attack by tackling the invaders. After being tackled, the player with the ball retains possession, stands quickly and taps the ball backwards with his foot to a team mate. This feature marks the key difference between the two versions of rugby. In rugby union, which staged its world cup championship in July in South Africa, a tackle can bring play to a virtual standstill as the two teams crowd around the ball to try to gain possession. In rugby league, if the team with the ball has not scored, kicked or otherwise lost possession after six consecutive tackles, the ball is handed over to the opposition which tries to carry it as far as possible back towards the other team鈥檚 territory before another six tackles are completed. This means that rugby league is arguably a much faster, more physically demanding contest than rugby union, with the ball in play for more than 60 per cent of the game, or nearly double that of a rugby union match.

Random deception

With such a fast-moving game, trying to pinpoint what gives one highly trained team the edge over another might seem impossibly difficult. But experts in the field of notational analysis suggest otherwise. 鈥淎lthough invasive sports appear to be random activities, with players running in many directions and passes and kicks occurring at any time, their actual structure is surprisingly invariant,鈥� says Keith Lyons, director of the Centre for Notational Analysis at Cardiff Institute of Higher Education. 鈥淗owever, there are perhaps four or five occasions when the game deviates from its expected structure. If you can mobilise these variants, known as perturbations, to your advantage, you are more likely to win.鈥� For Clarke, the collisions in rugby league are the source of these perturbations, and he is convinced that controlling the collisions directs the course of a game.

Clarke followed up his study of what was going wrong for Great Britain with a frame-by-frame analysis of the 1992 Ashes series, played in Australia. One of his favourite sequences to demonstrate the sheer physical brutality of a collision shows the British player, Andy Platt, being grounded by two, six-foot, 17-stone Australian forwards. As Clarke edges the tape on, Platt slowly crashes forward, his face red with effort.

Clarke examined what happened between a ball coming into play after a collision and the point where the new attack was again halted by defenders. 鈥淚 wanted to know what constituted a collision and how players prepared for and executed it,鈥� he says.

Different approaches

An attacking player waiting for a pass usually breaks into a jog as he prepares to catch the ball. As soon as he has the ball, he sprints or strides to meet defenders and, making contact, tries to break the tackle or is stopped in his tracks.

Clarke found that Australian attackers began running from farther back to build up speed before receiving the ball, and that the British defenders took longer to meet them because they were slower to make up the 10 metres that all but one of the defenders must retreat after a successful tackle. This means that Australian attackers were standing still when they caught the ball for only 16 per cent of passes, and they sprinted for 2.77 seconds on average between receiving the ball and meeting a defender. British attackers, however, were standing still when they received the ball for 30 per cent of passes, and they sprinted for only 1.69 seconds before being brought down. The extra second meant that Australian attackers were moving faster, and with greater momentum, when they hit a defender.

Although a sprinting player is more difficult to stop, most attackers stride into a tackle rather than sprint so they can brace themselves better for the impact. However, Clarke found that 29 per cent of Australian attacks involved the player with the ball sprinting into a tackle, compared with only 5 per cent of British attacks.

Apart from demanding extra resilience from the defenders, sprinting attackers also had a significant impact on the distance travelled within the collision. 鈥淎ustralian players made a mean distance of 1.72 metres in the collision, the British only 1.28 metres,鈥� notes Clarke. He multiplied the difference by the number of collisions per match, and calculated that Australia, on average, won an extra 90 metres every game: 鈥淭hat鈥檚 a huge amount of territory gained by being able to drive forward during the collision.鈥�

The Australians also turned another tactic on it head. British attackers had been trained to complete tackles quickly and bring the ball back into play as soon as possible. The aim was to maintain the advance and 鈥渒eep the Australian defence on the back foot鈥�, notes Clarke. When British attackers met defenders, he says, they would drop to the ground without making the Australian defence do any more work. In contrast, his study revealed that Australian attackers remained on their feet for an average of 0.63 seconds longer than their British counterparts, wearing down the defenders and drawing in extra players to halt the attack. 鈥淲hen the British defence was disrupted by these defenders moving into the tackle,鈥� he notes, 鈥渢he Australian attacker quickly fell to the ground, played the ball and allowed his team-mates to exploit the openings in the British defence.鈥� Only 4 per cent of British attacks required three defenders to halt them compared with 13 per cent of Australian attacks.

Britain鈥檚 defenders did not stand up too well to intense scrutiny either. Clarke found that they tried to stop 33 per cent of attacks standing still, compared with 24 per cent of attacks confronted in the same way by Australian defenders. So, on average, Britain lost half a metre of territory more than Australia for every collision in defence.

Statistics like these emphasise the significance of the collision in determining the outcome of a game, says Clark. He stresses that successful teams dominate the collision and, to emphasise his point, his study for the RFL also includes blueprints for training machines that are designed to help players exploit collisions in defence and in attack.

Attackers who use Clarke鈥檚 prototype training machine would be expected to charge through sets of padded gates, similar to saloon doors in a Western film. The aim would be to build up an attacker鈥檚 strength and stamina as the gates鈥� resistance gradually increased until the player was stopped. The machine designed for defenders would fire a tackle bag along a horizontal pole set above head height. The bag鈥檚 momentum would be controlled to simulate an oncoming player travelling at up to 10 metres per second, and the defender would be expected to stop the mock attacker.

Although Clarke鈥檚 unconventional approach looks like being too late to help British players this time round, the RFL seems to have listened to his message. 鈥淒ominating collisions might not win matches,鈥� says John Kear, the RFL鈥檚 coaching executive and head of the junior national squad, 鈥渂ut it will help level the playing field.鈥�

In the meantime, the home nations will have to rely on the more traditional virtues of dogged determination and ball-handling ability to overcome Australia. Whatever the result, Clarke will be watching keenly for two reasons. First, he has a vested interest in England鈥檚 performance: his brother Phil hopes to be playing at loose-forward. And second, he is a great sports fan: 鈥淲hat is so fascinating about sport is its unpredictability鈥� he says. 鈥淚 can study tapes for hours, developing theories, yet if it鈥檚 your day, you win.鈥� (see Diagram).

Software route to success

JOHN KEAR, the coaching executive of the Rugby Football League, was like a child with a new toy. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know how we managed without it,鈥� he enthuses. Gathering sports data by notational analysis was always a time-consuming process that meant watching live events or videos, and marking on graph paper the number of passes, kicks and so on. Now the process has been streamlined.

鈥淐oaches were spending hours just watching videos,鈥� says John Lee, head of Sportsfile, an Australian computer software company based in New South Wales. 鈥淎s a rugby league fan, I鈥檝e been writing software to help coaches with notational analysis for five years.鈥� Now he has written a program that saves time and paperwork. The program has already been adopted by top Australian clubs, and links videos to computer software for notational analysis.

Called Scrumbase, the system can provide coaches with details of a team or individual鈥檚 involvement in a match: how many passes they made, how far they ran, and so on. Or a coach can select from the screen menu the number of times his team dropped the ball, passed forward or committed fouls. Indeed, any aspect of play can be dredged up from the computer鈥檚 memory.

This information is fed into the PC by Lee鈥檚 team who watch match videos and enter codes via the keyboard for every single aspect of play, every second of the game 鈥� who has the ball, whether he runs or passes, who tackles him and so on. Sportsfile then sends the information to coaches by modem the morning after the match.

So when the coach links his PC to a video editor containing a tape of the game, the PC software knows exactly what is happening at every stage of the match. It locates the events the coach selects and transfers them onto a blank tape for viewing.

Kear may wish to see his team鈥檚 kicks, so he selects 鈥淎ll Players Kick鈥� from the screen menu, and the tape editor provides him with a video tape of every kick, alongside on-screen data. He can also provide players with a tape covering their total involvement in the game or maybe just their defensive or attacking play.

鈥淚 don鈥檛 even need to turn on the TV,鈥� says Kear. And coaches can adapt the program to suit their requirements. All they need is a standard PC and two video decks with editing facilities.