Always a Wasp

Hopefully the BT Sport App will work in my part of France!

BT sport app works if use the data on you phone. You can hotspot to your laptop or tablet.

it wont work if you try using over Wi-Fi and will be region locked and you’ll have to use VPN

I had a different match experience last night - watching on VK without any sound whatsoever. Was interesting to be able to watch the whole game without any interference or anyone else opinion or comments. I quite enjoyed it - well I may have done if we had played better.

First a couple of points on things I have seen mentioned on this and he match thread.
Kicking percentages - as has been pointed out before, Jacob has a better kick % this season and last compared to Jimmy and while not Neil Jenkins is certainly not a 50% kicker.
Turnovers - we are still the team with the most turnovers won this season - we may not have Youngs and Willis at their jackalling best but we have still managed to win plenty.

Personally I don't think 10 is our major issue. Looking at the last few games (particularly yesterday and Quins) it is the breakdown where it goes wrong. Set piece is fine but there are around 40 lineouts and maybe 10-15 scrums a game but around 250 tackles, many of which end up in a ruck - just by sheer volume these have a significant impact on the game and if you are off the boil here it is difficult to control the game.

The last two games we have been too slow and too easily out muscled at the breakdown. The opposition backrows haven't been all that on paper - Wallace, White, Jefferies and Heenan are decent squad players, nothing more, but in both games they have spoilt our ball, slowed it down and turned it over. On our attacking rucks we have been late, poorly positioned and ineffective and this meant that the ball was not there to get away quickly. A big part of this is the forwards but part in Robson not being as quick to get there as he was previously, if he is a fraction slower, the opposition can hit the ruck again and destabilise it for a moment and gain a second or two more to ensure they are in position. Robson is also slower at getting the ball away form a 'clean' ruck that he was, I saw him stood hand on ball choosing an option far more than he used to (perception only I have no data on this). If you have a set defensive line in front of you it is hard for a 10 to be all that creative, it doesn't matter if you're Dan Carter, Carlos Spencer or Barry John it's difficult to be creative when the opposition are set and formed in front of you, hence we resorted to more runners off 9 to take contact and try to get quicker ball - rinse and repeat.

We might say this is down to Brad missing, and that is some of it, but it is about balancing the resources we have. We want Tom Willis and Barbeary to be carrying, they are more effective than anyone else - to be effective they should ideally not be hitting too many rucks as that will increase fatigue, low effectiveness and mean they are in a ruck rather than being options to carry the ball or run an effective dummy line. That means that we need to be far better organised in who is tasked to clear out and making sure they are in position to do that and not being carrying options. To see an example of how this works, consider Wales performance against Ireland and the against Scotland (Sam Larner has got some excellent stats on this if anyone is interested). Against Ireland, Wales used their better ball carriers to hit rucks and as a result their carry effusiveness was impaired and Wales had very little gain from their forwards. Against Scotland, props Thomas Francis and Wynn Jones hit a combined 48 rucks (while barely carrying), while ball carriers in Moriarty and Basham hit far fewer but carried more and far more effectivly - for more meters and more gainline success. We have used Alo and West to carry and it is nor as effective as you'd think, they made a combined 7m last night.

I appreciate there is a lot of waffle in their but my point is I think we need to really focus on ensuring quick ball from the breakdown and setting a gameplan to deliver that as other teams are seeing that if they kill us there we have no where to go. Speed did improve when Porter came on and he has looked far better than Robson for four games now, but he still had issues when the forwards didn't secure the breakdown effectively. It is easy to blame playmakers when our attack looks stale but it is difficult without the platform.

Very well articulated post about our ruck issues.
We need to be supporting and clearing out the attacking rucks better. Any promising attack we either were pinged for holding on or we attempted a offload that wouldn’t go to hand or put us on the back foot.

Immanuel Feyi-Waboso Joins Wasps Academy Ahead Of 2022-23 Season

From Cardiff. A tip off from Dai?

From the offy.

https://www.wasps.co.uk/news/immanuel-feyi-waboso-joins-wasps-academy-ahead-of-2022-23-season/

https://cardiffbluesblog.com/2021/10/10/feyi-waboso-set-to-depart-for-medical-studies/amp/

This might explain more as he’s studying at Ashton university just up the road in Birmingham.

Scrum - we probably have the weakest scrum in the premiership, we are giving away too many penalties rightly or wrongly at scrum time. Giving easy territory to our oppositions/ 5 meter line outs. Fingers crossed the new argie can at least give us some parity. If the penalties we are conceding go in our favour we would have been on the better side of the score on a number of games. It just takes the momentum out of our game.

It works on my laptop with Firefox - only problem is that it is very low quality (480 x 272) whereas all the others have a 1280 x 720 version available.

I’ve had the same problems, the quality is low and pretty much unwatchable as you can’t tell who the players are.

I didn't get chance to watch, how did Atkinson get on?

Not great to be honest. Some iffy handling, dropped a lot of balls and dodgy passing. He also seemed to lose his footing every time he went for a run and side step. A lot of attacks die with him. Would prefer to see him at 10 and not 15 but the Worcester lad seems cool and calm and the shit his his.

Where is the Under 20 squad listed?