|
Rank | Posts | Team |
International Chairman | 5480 | No Team Selected |
Joined | Service | Reputation |
Dec 2001 | 23 years | |
Online | Last Post | Last Page |
May 2021 | Oct 2018 | LINK |
Milestone Posts |
|
Milestone Years |
|
Location |
|
Signature |
187.jpg [img:2penstlp]http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/5994/saints7sk.gif[/img:2penstlp]
"...the biggest boor, the most opinionated pompous bigot that frequents these
boards and he is NOT to be taken at all seriously. ":187.jpg |
|
| I agree it's time for new blood. McNamara has taken this team as far as he can take it. I'd say there are three areas where he has to carry the can for our defeats.
Selection
Of course nobody ever agrees with every selection decision, but there's an element about McNamara of "defaulting" to picking players on reputation (or competition), rather than picking on form or ability, I think. The selection of Widdop seemed based largely on the fact that he's playing in the NRL. The selection of Joel Tomkins seemed based on the fact that he was good before he went to RU. The non-selection of Hardaker especially, but also Charnley over Burgess, and Whitehead in the first two games, suggested a coach who was unsighted about the form of UK-based players. That's understandable for a man whose job is in Australia, but until we have ALL our best players in the NRL, we need a coach who is able to select the best players on form, not the best players on reputation, or the best players in the NRL.
Tactics
We've seen flashes of what England can do in this tournament when they actually throw the ball around. But most of the time on the field, the team has not played that way, preferring an ultra-conservative approach of five drives and a not-necessarily-very-good kick. Last week one could argue we allowed Australia back into the game by abandoning the expansive style we had played in the first half for a safety-first approach in the second. There was an element of that today as well. We looked much better when we actually moved the ball. However, I fear McNamara is a part of the generation of coaches who developed the percentages mentality of possession and conservatism, and expansive play does not come naturally to him. Either he coached the players not to throw the ball around too much, and they followed his instructions, or he was trying to get them to play more rugby, but they didn't. In both cases, the coach is culpable.
Ruthlessness
International coaches have to be ruthless, because you don't have a full league season to experiment and wait for someone's form or performance to improve. I think McNamara is ruthless off the field, and that's fine. But on the field he isn't. There were performances by certain England players which were simply not good enough, and should have resulted in changes. Obviously there are matters of opinion here, but Watkins simply did not do enough in his three games to justify his place. Widdop certainly didn't offer any significant threat from half-back to justify his spot, and while I think Sam Tomkins is a fantastic player normally, his form in this tournament has not been as good as Hardaker's form this year. You could make a similar case for Charnley needing to be dropped for Burgess after his first two anonymous games.
The team's performances were good. They were competitive. But I felt that with 15 minutes to go today, with New Zealand rocking, England looked like, more than anything, they lacked self-belief. There were several scrums where we should have been running to stop the clock, but we hung around. There were times when we gave George or Tom Burgess the ball on the fourth tackle to run a dead-ball hit-up, when we desperately needed to spread the ball. There was an atrocious kicking game from Smith which needed a tactics change from the coach. None of these things happened. At various points, it looked like the plan was simply to pass the ball to Sam Tomkins and hope he'd somehow perform a miracle. We looked like a team who believed they were going to lose, not a team who were ruthlessly going to win. Exactly the same as last week, when rather than hammer home our advantage over the Aussies, we stood back and expected to lose with fearful, expectant play.
Coaching is a harsh game, but while we can't change the entire team (and wouldn't want to - there are some very good players in there ), we clearly DO need a change if we are to get past what is now almost more a mental that physical obstacle in order to start winning those tight games, rather than inevitably losing them.
|