Defence

[Vespula Vulgaris]

There's a lot of talk about how we urgently need a new defence coach, and how Costello must go now, and to be honest Im not sure I really understand it.

Our defence diesnt seem any poorer now than it has been for years, in fact If it has changed I'd be tempted to say it actually looks more solid than it has for a while.

If there is anything we need to the worrying about then it is our attack.

And the negative comments about Costello seem to be based around the fact that he has taken on a more senior role than he was hired to do.

Assuming that senior role needs doing, who should be doing it if it isn't him?

We all want to see junior players stepping up and trying to make the best of the opportunity presented, but when a coach does it they should be sacked?

It seems a bit of a knee jerk reaction to a team that is underperforming to me. And there doesn't seem to be anything concrete to back it up.

Maybe someone can explain It to me?

[NellyWellyWaspy]

To me it is getting better, slowly. But there are areas we are not so good with. High balls for example. Rolling mauls. But, the tackle and line speed is getting better. Too often we make the tackle, but get dragged another 5 or ten metres. Single man on man tackles. Rather than two on one, one takes him down, the other jackals. We have lost that without Young, Taylor and Willis (none of whom played this week). In locks, we need a lineout specialist and a jackal. We don't have that. We don't really have a rip ball from tackle specialist either.

Skills all in abundance in the Leinster side.

A work in progress.

[Brandnewtorugby]

I agree, for me, the spark of hope from the Leinster game was from the passages where we kept the ball moving with passes and careful offloads. It just seemed like the support lines were starting to get better, and against a good side.

I noticed Leinster almost always had two support runners with every break. Might be my imagination, but were they going to ground just before the tackle on occasion, it seemed like it made the would be tackler overshoot, or risk high tackle penalty.

[Raggs]

With you VV. We're not really doing too terribly there. If our clearances were improved, and we stopped dropping the bloody ball when attacking, we wouldn't have to defend so hard either. Put Jack Willis back in, and suddenly we're a different beast I reckon. JdJ at 13 too.

[westwaleswasp]

I have been banging on about this all year. Defense is not the issue, attack is.

Our attack is toothless. Our only strategy is bosh through the forwards.

Defensively we have one on ones that are missed through confidence, with many, many guilty players.
Structurally it does not look too bad.

You cannot win games with an attack as weak as ours, and in particular our backs have gone from golden to lead.

It is impossible to lose Wade, Cipriani, Robson for the most part  and Gopperth and not have a big effect, so there is some sympathy there, but for me if we could get back to scoring 3-4 tries a game we would have more Ws.
 

[WaspieMatt]

Yes, but we are still leaking 3-4 per game. Granted our attack is poor at the moment and needs addressing but just because our defence has been questionable for three of four seasons and doesn’t appear to be a whole lot worse this season isn’t a reason to try and change things.
This season we’ve had a few games where it hasn’t been too bad- Leinster being an example but equally we’ve had more than our fair share of shockers. My view is we still absolutely do need a rethink around defence but I admit it’s not the only issue.

[westwaleswasp]

We certainly need to defend the maul better. We seem fine at it at times, but how often do we hear "we defended it well apart from the tries"?
Not sure how you coach top players to not miss one on ones. How much is structural, how much just confidence?

[Vespula Vulgaris]

We certainly need to defend the maul better. We seem fine at it at times, but how often do we hear "we defended it well apart from the tries"?
Not sure how you coach top players to not miss one on ones. How much is structural, how much just confidence?

I think a lot of it is down to lack of trust in team-mates.  You often see a player move slightly out of position to cover a space that could be being covered by someone else.  That I'd guess is a side effect of having so many different combinations and new players in the squad.  It should improve over time...

[Tervueren]

Having watched the game on TV now, the performance looks better than it did from my seat at the Ricoh.
The defence was mostly good (as said above "apart from the tries"), the problem being that we did too much of it because of rushing things and making errors or giving away needless penalties.
Their tries from mauls were going to be difficult to stop, but it was errors by us that put them into that position.
Our attack started to look better, Wasps-like, but then each time panic set in and the chance was lost. IMO we should have had one or two tries in the first half, and with the attack of the past couple of seasons we would have.
I though we looked more like a team than we have since the Ulster pre-season game, the one where it looked like we had cracked the defensive issues and would therefore go on to great things, but...

As "poor-quality-championship-level-signings go", Morris looked to have a pretty good game:-) Lima seemed to be more in it, Cruse must be a machine, even Elliot's game seemed better on second viewing once I could see his work in the centre rather than the lapses and overly-tentative performance in front of me on the wing.

IF we can build from that performance, then we will be OK. Our defence needs work, but it was having to defend too much yesterday rather than the general quality of the defence that let us down.

We clearly have good players and are able to mount attacks, by not getting over-excited we might finish more of them off.

P.S. Key will be getting the man in the seat in front of me to wear his lucky hat for the whole match. We have a 100% record when he attends and wears it (though he only bought it for the Northampton game and did not go to the Bath one), he was wearing it for the second half so there could be something in that.

[wasps]

I agree entirely that our defence is no worse than it has been for a few years now - but that's no reason to ignore it.
it is still a weakness.
I do however agree that Costello doesn't necessarily deserve the flak he gets given that our poor defence has not been caused by him.

Our defence was poor when Brad Davis came in and it took more than a season for it to start improving.
Just as it was getting good, he left.
Our defence then got worse again when Phil Blake joined and only at the end of his tenure did it look like it was starting to come together.

So, Costello has joined. Undoubtedly he doesn't have the CV to generally warrant being a defence coach of a title chasing premiership side... and as we know, he wasn't recruited to be that in the first place.
Our defence is poor, but it's not been 5 months yet and we're already seeing the occasional sign of improvement - at worst, that's on par with what we saw from Brad and Phil.


I don't believe that Costello is the right man to get us an Ireland or Saracens quality defence, however, I don't believe he's doing any worse than Phil or Brad did at this point in their tenures, and therefore doesn't deserve the abuse he gets from some posters on some sites.

That being said, unless there is a significant improvement in our defence before the end of the season, we do need to look at getting a specialist defense coach, because just saying that "it's no worse than before" is not good enough if you have genuine title aspirations.



our attack is something different, but I genuinely believe that we'll start seeing it improve if we can keep a relatively consistent 9, 10, 12, 15 on the pitch.

[wasps]

IF we can build from that performance, then we will be OK. Our defence needs work, but it was having to defend too much yesterday rather than the general quality of the defence that let us down.

That's a very important point, and we see it 10 fold when we play Exeter.
We give teams possession, meaning we have to defend for long periods. Our defence isn't great which means that inevitably we'll let something through.
The opposition know this, so they stay calm in attack.


Maybe we need to be more aggressive in defence, force the opposition to make mistakes so that they start to panic more when attacking us.
If it could mean that we don't have to defend for long periods, it could be the change that we're looking for.

That being said, changing to a more aggressive defence, probably means another change in structure, and back to square 1.

[Raggs]

Improve the attack and the defence will have less work to do.

I think Phil was an odd one, if I had to guess he was an emotional defence guy, and it worked well for Tigers, but perhaps not our personnel. Come the prem final, when the emotion was there, our defence was immense. With Costello we seem to be working harder more often I feel, and I do believe it's improving. Defence, like attack, improves with familiarity, as you know who is going to do what, and when we have JdJ at 13, we tend to look very good (I'd be interested in the stats there)..

[Hymenoptera]

Until you cut out the basic mistakes it really doesn't matter how much your defense improves because your always under pressure and will eventually crack.

Knocking on high balls isn't a defensive frailty, its an individuals mistake and unfortunately the whole team is making them game after game and offering control back to the opposition.

Poor basic skills, poor judgement, poor execution and poor decision making...for me, eradicate these and we are a different side.

[Old Geezer]

I think one area where we are vulnerable is in the 10 channel. Lima's inside shoulder is often targeted with some success.  Partly because of the way he positions his feet and body in defence it is easy to read the weakness.  I think there needs to be better understanding and more communication between him and the back row.  Another thing I would say is that I still get the feeling that we fall off tackles too much.  Perhaps that is because we often go into a tackle as one man and rather too high.  Ok to go high if there is a second tackler going low!  Just my observations.

[SML]

Putting some numbers to this, Wasps have conceded more points in the premiership this season than any teams other than Leicester and Bristol i.e. they rank 10th for defence.  In attack, they rank 7th.  Last season, we were 3rd in attack and 4th in defence.  So there is deterioration in both, more markedly in defence.

Regarding the coaching, it's hard to know who is contributing what, but I am concerned about the depth in the coaching team. We have three coaches (plus Dai).  Saracens list 6 on their web site plus the DoR.  One of these is more fitness oriented, but that still leaves five coaches versus three.  Exeter show 11 plus the DoR.  Of these, 4 look like first team coaches.

Two points from that. Firstly, we look short at least one first team coach (as Wilson's role was not filled), which must be impacting the ability to prepare for games.  Secondly, we seem less inclusive in acknowledging the wider support team than others are.  On that second point, Dai seems more detached from his coaches than McCall and Baxter.  I wonder whether that reflects limited chemistry within the coaching group?  Does anyone have any insight into that?