How do we feel about the Bok's use of their substitutes ?
How do we feel about the Bok's use of their substitutes ?
Eddie Jones says the Springboks’ "bold and courageous" use of their substitutes should be viewed as innovation and not a threat to the game.
France have been playing with a 6-2 split for ages so this it’s the logical extension, I guess. Probably also inevitable as firwards get fitter and more skilful. Even ten years ago you didn’t have forwards with anywhere near the same level of handling etc.
Though I will say that Eddie has been trying make players playing in any position a thing for ages, so when he says the saffas are brave, he really means him.
Fair forwards are very skillful now and I feel keeping the forwards fresh is important
That's certainly the point of a 6-2 bench (set aside 7-1 as that was a slightly different situation). But I think its one of the things that is making Rugby more dangerous and counteracting any benefits to trying to reduce tackle heights and speed up the game etc.*
The idea of 6 forwards on the bench is you have your biggest players running at full speed for longer in a game, which means bigger collisions for longer. It also helps add to the dominance that defense has over attack in Rugby as well. The downside of that is that it leads to territory gains predominantly from referee decisions, when ideally referee's would be making fewer decisions.
On the old /r for Rugby there was a fairly constant debate between mostly Australasian/Pacific fans wanting to speed the game up, and SA/EU fans arguing that what they were asking for was to reduce two players from the field & just play League instead.
I think that ignores what Rugby Union is right now. The League criticism was 5-tackle, kick. But really Union has probably degenerated to 3-tackle, kick. Or worse, 3-tackle, penalty.
If we force forwards to play longer and not allow teams to substitute entire forward packs so they only play half a game, then the idea is that the forwards would have to boost their aerobic fitness and probably reduce size. That would (in theory) lower the impacts from collisions and eventually, through fatiguing the defense allow for the attack to find more holes and let the players make territory, rather than milking penalties and piggy-backing downfield.
*Though there is some argument as well that some players are more likely to make accidentally bad contacts due to fatigue.
People seem to forget they only had one more forward than the ABs on the bench.
Love it! High risk, High reward. Could have all gone wrong, but didn't - it's good to see some different thinking, especially in warm up games
For them It's not a bad bet to have more forwards than backs. For the boks I would feel secure slotting a forward into a back position of need be vs the other way.
In terms of how the actual match played out, the bench wasn't a big impact.