The agony continues
Sunday 22nd January 2017: European Challenge Cup, Pool stage, round 6; Stade Francais v Harlequins in Paris. Result – Stade Francais 27 Harlequins 17. Effect: Stade Francais qualify for the ‘last Eight’ knock-out stage, Harlequins bow out.
Harlequins’ 2016/2017 season woes continued yesterday. Eight days previously, playing at home against Edinburgh Rugby, they only had to win the game to qualify for the business end of this Cup competition in a seeded position. They duly lost with a pitiful performance, thereby setting themselves up for this ‘winner takes all’ clash to decide which team gained the last quarter-final place.
Let’s get the mitigating circumstances out of the way first.
First – and best – the Stade Jean Bouin pitch was part frozen. As a result, when we hardy UK Quins fans sitting at home snug under our rugs on our drawing room sofa tuned in at 1255 hours, we were greeted by the studio presenters informing us that kick-off had been delayed until at least 2.30pm.
In one prospective viewer at least, this brought the grim hope that the game might get cancelled altogether which – bearing in mind that the previous weekend (of all ironies, regarding the Italian side Timisoara Saracens’ home game against Stade Francais) had resulted in the away team being awarded a notional bonus point 28-0 victory and the home team being hit with a 30,000 euro fine – might have been one manner, on this evidence as it turned out the only one, in which Quins could have progressed further.
As it was, when the game did start, the pitch became a bit of a quagmire very quickly and in places was distinctly icy, which made precision and execution of moves a bit of a lottery for both teams. That said, it goes without saying that Stade adapted far better to the conditions and were infinitely the better side on the day – the final score does not do them justice, a 20 point margin would not have flattered them.
Secondly, Quins continue to labour under an injury list as long as the arm of the person with the longest arms you have ever met in your life.
Thirdly, Irish referee John Lacey was consistently inconsistent in his policing of the breakdown throughout the match. To this prejudiced eye, he seemed to ‘ping’ Quins players – every time they clamped themselves over the ball – for ‘being off their feet’, whereas he very rarely handed out similar punishment whenever a Stade Francais player blatantly did exactly the same.
Fourthly, as usual this term, the Quins team was saddled with the not-inconsiderable handicap of being given its game plan and tactics by the incumbent Quins coaching staff.
And that’s about it, really.
As usual, Quins had practically zero penetration in midfield and amongst the backs generally.
Danny Care had a nightmare of a game. He’d given a media interview earlier in the weekend that spoke of his resolve to win back his starting place in the England XV as part of his quest to make the British and Irish Lions tour to New Zealand in the summer. However, on this evidence, he’s no longer one of the top four scrum halves in the country and wouldn’t be within a mile of my England Six Nations squad. The fact that he’s the Quins club captain this season is probably one cause (of many) of our current travails.
The one modern rugby union tactic that drives me mad – and okay, let me hold my hand up, I’m a sixty-something throwback to the ‘good old, bad old’ days to which the sport is never (thankfully) going to return – is that of hoofing the ball miles into the air in the general direction of the opposition try line, presumably in the hope that the opposition ‘defenders’ will make a Horlicks of either catching it, running it, or hoofing it back.
Which, in this day of professional rugby players spending their weekdays doing endless drills and practice, they rarely do.
Rugby as it used to be was a game of possession and passing. Possession because, without the ball, you could not go on the attack. Passing because – of course – you can always make far greater and swifter progress downfield by passing the ball (to a team-mate in better space than you) than you can by running there yourself.
In my day, it was a criminal offence against your own team to ‘gift’ the opposition the ball by kicking it away to them – in my father’s schooldays, you got beaten for doing it.
You only ever kicked the ball, hopefully over the heads of the opposition defensive line, towards an area of open space and preferably also towards a touchline, thereby making it difficult to collect and return, save perhaps sideways into touch, thereby advancing your team at least 20 or 30 yards down the pitch.
The modern tactic of hoofing the ball straight downfield is tantamount to an admission that you and your team-mates are incapable of mounting a successful attack ball-in-hand and have completely run out of ideas. Ergo, the best thing to do is get rid of the pill.
Let’s deal with those two points in turn.
Firstly, giving up your possession and kicking the ball away, effectively because you cannot make any progress with your attacks.
Think about it – what effect is that going to have upon the opposition? I’ll tell you what effect it would have had upon any team in my day. We’d have gained huge confidence and encouragement from it, that’s what (“Hello, the opposition have kicked the ball away. They plainly cannot make any progress with it. We’ve got them on the back foot! Keep playing just as we are and they’ll ‘collapse’ any time soon and give up …”).
Secondly, ‘getting rid of the pill’ in a sport in which possession of the ball is a key component is clearly a terrible and defeatist tactic.
Worse, this scourge of the modern game has blighted it because – in response to having the ball kicked straight to them – teams have reacted tactically by adopting a default position in which they ‘do exactly the same’, i.e. the player catching or collecting the ball, runs forward perhaps ten yards or so, and then hoofs the ball back.
As a result, at least 50% of the time, a tedious side-show of ‘aerial ping-pong’ follows.
Yesterday’s Stade versus Quins game was a case in point.
The only trouble was that, when Quins hoofed their possession way, Stade usually ‘returned it with sizable interest’.
But of course, this being Quins in the 2016/2017 season – playing with lacklustre uniformity and under the yoke of such poor coaching – and despite the evidence that every Quins fan sitting in the UK, let alone in the freezing Parisian stands, could see all too clearly that it wasn’t working, the team didn’t try something else, or just drop the tactic … they kept on doing it. Perhaps on the erroneous assumption that if you keep doing the same thing often enough in life, eventually it will work. It didn’t.
So that’s it then, the Quins’ 150th season now coming to its business end and, far from winning something with which to celebrate the occasion, we’re now out of the junior European Cup competition, sitting firmly in the bottom half of the Premiership, facing the imminent disappearance of six or seven of our supposedly best players on Six Nations duty … and playing as badly as I can ever remember, including the season in which we got relegated.
We’ve now had four consecutive seasons of ‘treading water’ – or ‘going backwards’ if you want to look at it another way. At this stage my chief emotion is “Roll on the summer, when this pain might stop for a few sweet weeks”.
