Wasps of this year (and before) had a number of areas of weakness. An old adage. You can't score if you don't have the ball. How much of that is down to Danny?
Our lineouts have at best been mediocre. Not straight is an Ashley failing. Not thrown to the right place is either bad throwing or miscommunication. Caught by the oppo is just plain bad. Driving from the lineout is not good, as we too often let the oppo swim through and trap the ball in the maul. Kick to the corner, win the lineout and drive over. We don;t do that at all well.
Our front row gets out muscled, so we give away copious quantities of penalties on the oppo put in. We rarely win a scrum against the head. We rarely drive a scrum over for the try.
In the field, our forwards are often not so good defensively, so we miss tackles. They don't hold the gain line.
We do jackal the ball well.
Our forwards try to run through the oppo when we have the ball, but get pinned back, rarely getting over the gainline. We fail to support the player tackled, and get pinged for holding on.
Because we don't have the forwards to make the breaks (the way Itoje and Vunipola do), our oppo forwards spread out and close the defence across the field.
Our backs are fast and inventive, but they don't make the holes and break through.
Their defensive line speed must be almost the worst in the Prem, and so we lose at least 5-10m every phase.
Wasps were caught out by the new regulations around the breakdown last year. I am hoping that the new signings will help with that. So, both Shields and Carr will do nicely. But I am not sure our locks have it in them, nor our front row. I am worried that Hughes, Rieder and Taylor will continue to be injured and be off the pace. Nathan has not looked anywhere near his best as he receivers. Going forward, his last game he made little attempt to avoid the tackle, he just stood there, and made few less ground than he would normally. When Taylor did come on, he was missing that busy spark that he used to have.
Look at the stats for last year. I would guess they show us playing in our own half more than half the match, and having less than 50% of the possession.
Could I sum it up? We just didn't seem to WANT to make it hard for our opposition. We seemed to lack the desire or fire. How much of all this is:
#1 The wrong players in the squad?
#2 Injuries
#3 Leadership and vision on the field
#4 Training
I do not know. We have new players, but a lot of the old ones too.
We start with a bad injury list.
I have never been convinced with Joe as captain. The vision for what to do has not been there, the flexibility to change tactics. He isn't in the ref's ear because he can't keep up with the ref. Often I have seen him loping across the pitch to try to bend the ref's ear but getting there too late. I have watched Brad Shields as a captain for Hurricanes. He does it right.
Dai has some really tough decisions to make, once he has finished his signings. It was 'tough' to let Eastmond, Hask and Cips go, to see Thompson leave (I doubt Dai wanted him to go). He has let Phil Blake go (he needs to replace him, maybe one of the coaches the RFU have let go?). It was a shame to see Jones retire.
Dai CAN address three of the above four points, and has the opportunity. Will he do it? I think he needs to.
Topic: Thoughts on the end of the season (Read 1975 times)
Always a Wasp