Jeff Probyn: ‘Understanding the game’ won England World Cup

As England‘s coaches prepare their squad for the autumn internationals it seems they have chosen to go back to the past for inspiration.
England’s attack coach Mike Catt has chosen one of the oldest themes in the coaching manual when trying to articulate how we should interpret the team’s progress throughout this series and that is ‘Understanding the game’.
On the field ‘Understanding the game’ has come in many guises, ‘Heads up rugby‘, ‘Thinking on your feet’ and ‘Playing what’s in front of you’ are just some of the terms that have been used over the years to describe a pretty basic need of any player (club or international), which is to  use your brain while playing!
I know this may sound obvious but in these days of professional rugby where all involved are desperate to keep their jobs, many coaches actively discourage players who have a maverick talent from displaying it. Players with talents can be some of the hardest to integrate into a team as most have an inbuilt ability to understand the game and see opportunities that others miss, as a result they can get isolated and frustrated and create tensions within the squad.
I was talking with Gareth Chilcott the other day and he told me he had been watching his son playing in a junior county game and he was bemoaning the fact that one team had two big lads at centre that did nothing but run straight into the opposition (can’t believe a prop was watching the backs) and yet they were selected for further honours.
He said he was told that now at youth level they no longer pick players on ability in any given position but by measuring height, size and weight and then calculate how big they will be in a few years time with the appropriate gym work. Then, once they achieve the ‘right size’, they would be put into a position and coached how to play it.
If this is true, it is a very sad indictment of the professional game where it would seem natural skills and enthusiasm have given way to a kind of genetic selection based on potential growth.
Cooch pointed out that under such a selection process the likes of Jeremy Guscott, Rory Underwood, Jason Robinson and short fat props like me and him would never have got the chance to play Premiership rugby let alone international.
It also explains why coaches now feel that every move and every play in attack or defence has to be choreographed and why we as spectators end up watching endless phases of play with the ball travelling laterally across the field with little or no forward progress unless a mistake is made.
By instilling in this England squad the ideal of understanding the game (which should be the aim of every coach) Catt is theoretically making himself redundant.
Understanding the game is about making decisions on the field based on what is actually happening, not what you want to happen or how you set-up a move during training. It is assessing the options second by second with all players in the team willing and able to adapt to take full advantage of a moment of inspiration.
The England try in the 2003 World Cup final was a perfect example. Having moved the ball laterally across the field, it was passed back inside from the wing by a tackled Lawrence Dallaglio to Jonny Wilkinson with the whole team lining up across the field matched by Australian defenders.
Jason Robinson, who had moved to fullback, saw an opportunity to attack the area where Dallaglio had been tackled (with defenders also on the ground) and run at that space, Wilkinson reacted to Robinson and passed him the ball against the flow of play and the try was scored.
The try, unlike the drop-goal that won the game, was about understanding the game and reacting to player innovation rather than following a preset pattern of moves and attempting to create a scoring opportunity.
If Catt can manage to get the England players doing that – in theory they would no longer need to be coached.
A team that plays with an understanding of the game (like the All Blacks) and can change their style of attack at every phase of play depending on how you defend against them, is very difficult to contain and is the level to which Catt wants the squad to aspire.
Understanding the game is not just a way of playing, it is about creating a mind set of actually thinking about what you as a squad want to achieve and how best to do it within an acceptable time frame, particularly when talking about World Cups.
It is not just about the players, it’s also about the team management and the backup from the Union as well.
The question has been asked of Lancaster how many games the team needs to win to make this series a success but understanding the game means that if we see by the end of the series that the players are playing with more fluency and variation in their game, then we should appreciate that progress has been made on the road to building a World Cup-winning team, no matter what the actual results of the games.
Lancaster and his management team know that they are on a journey that will take at least another year before they can expect their fledgling team to start producing the match-winning consistency needed to deliver a World Cup win on home soil. We should understand that.