When the Australia wing Harry Potter this week described the aerial contests in rugby as “a lottery in the modern game” with an often “random” outcome, you wonder why both England and the Wallabies are expected to use kicks to the air as a major tactic in Saturday’s opening autumn Test at Twickenham.
Ignoring the temptation with the wonderfully-named Potter to stray into comparisons with Quidditch, there is no doubt the winners of the battle above the ground could end up ahead on the scoreboard too, but with an inherent risk that gives this tale a fascinating twist.
England have picked Freddie Steward, Tom Roebuck and Tommy Freeman – each well over six feet tall – as their Nos 15, 14 and 13, while the other wing Immanuel Feyi-Waboso has the pace and aggression to chase hard on the ground.
Aerial duels
England are very aware of the threat posed by Joseph Suaalii (Photo: Getty)Australia’s back three of Potter, Andrew Kellaway and Max Jorgensen are not of the same size – their aerial game is led by Joseph Suaalii, the rangy centre recruited from rugby league, about whom England head coach Steve Borthwick said this week: “Suaalii’s kick-off work last year was very good and it has been a focus for us. With someone who can jump as high as that and has that athleticism, if the kick is on the money, stopping him winning the ball is a challenging thing to do.”
The last 10 minutes of England’s highly-prized second-Test win in Argentina in July was an object lesson in how Borthwick’s team use and react to kicks in attack and defence.
With the score tied at 17-17, two Argentina box-kicks were secured by an advancing Steward, long seen as a master in this facet, interspersed with three England kicks gamely chased by the wing Cadan Murley to put pressure on the Pumas, who eventually coughed up a winning try. And then the final restart was safely caught by England’s second row Charlie Ewels, and George Ford kicked the ball off for the win.
It was the latter situation – a last-minute restart stuffed up by of all people England’s Maro Itoje, knocking on under pressure from Suaalii – that helped hand a 42-37 win to the Wallabies last November.
The irony with Potter is he says he learnt a great deal about the aerial game when he played under Borthwick and England’s defence coach Richard Wigglesworth in Leicester Tigers’ 2021-22 Premiership-winning season.
Potter, now with Western Force, smilingly remembers the former scrum-half Wigglesworth being “certainly happy to kick more than we needed” in training.
When World Rugby made a crackdown on escorts creating a “glove” around the player receiving a kick this time last year, Borthwick initially reacted by saying: “You don’t want to turn rugby union into Aussie rules.” But he also made sure England were kicking a lot in the subsequent Six Nations.
Big risks
This season England have been practising the AFL-style overhead catch – as opposed to taking the ball into the chest – in the belief that a catch taken a metre higher in the air gives an obvious advantage. They have used the tall Saracens youngster Noah Caluori to play the part of Suaalii in training.
square RUGBY UNION This is Steve Borthwick's biggest England gamble yet
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Potter’s feeling is there has been a reduction in the “kick to kick” that had a comparatively high retention rate, so the kicking sequences now are shorter, but with the effect of “it so often ends up in a sort of random and loose-ball kind of attacking, counter-attack, kind of play.”
And that’s the risk element: the lack of a guarantee that a contestable kick will work. The highest numbers of turnovers conceded by the British & Irish Lions on their summer tour came from their back-three players Freeman, Blair Kinghorn, Mack Hansen and Hugo Keenan.
The 19-year-old Caluori burst into the headlines for his five tries against Sale Sharks a few weeks ago, when a high number of kicks paid off and he terrorised the much smaller Sale wings Arron Reed and Tom O’Flaherty. A week later, Saracens tried similar kicks against Freeman’s Northampton Saints, and Caluori retrieved a couple, but he wasn’t nearly so effective.
“I don’t think there’s many players that are super consistent in the air,” Potter says. “I have gone into the air quite well at times and not secured ball. You have got to be harsh on yourself, but it’s certainly a lottery in the modern game.”
Grubber kicks
So why do coaches stick with it? One clue is in the Opta stats from the Six Nations showing the average metres gained from a retained high kick or box-kick, together with the subsequent attack against a less structured defence, was around double the metres gained for a possession that doesn’t end in a kick. Double the metres gained is bound to look like gold dust to a coach.
The kick can come from the first phase, or after two or three. Watch for Ford at fly-half for England fixing the first-up defence and popping the ball to his carriers to make ground, then coming around the corner to work with Fraser Dingwall at 12 to find the wide men with a pass or a kick. Not every kick will be to the air; England in the Six Nations loved a grubber, too.
“With no escorting, it’s a bit of a free-for-all in the air,” Potter says. “There’s a lot of opportunity elsewhere to win the ball scraps on the floor and at the breakdown as well. So we’re going to have to be hungry for them and win the ball wherever it may be.”
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