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Wayne Smith: Decision Making on Attack Trailer

A sneak peak of Wayne Smith’s latest video to be released on Friday. Wayne demonstrates a simple model to assist in guiding your players to attack the space provided by the opposition defence.

Reason's Round-Up

Our resident journo’s weekly round up of news from around the rugby world, this week featuring: A very odd week indeed; de Vlliers sounding almost sane, strange happenings on planet Wallaby, Lievremont’s mad decision, match officials making up new laws and Flutey’s omission.

Fitness

It took me a couple of days to recover after our win over Australia at Eden Park. It was a hard physical test match – what you would literally call a bruising encounter – and without a high fitness level it would have taken me much longer to recover from the knocks…

JG's Round-Up

Our undercover man’s weekly round up of news from around the rugby world, this week featuring: Springboks Captain Fantastic, England’s set piece dominance, Japans progress, a lack of yellow cards, the growing Rugby World Cup injury count and the launch of Matt Hampson’s book…

Reason's Round-Up

Our resident journo’s weekly round up of news from around the rugby world, this week featuring: Johnson’s decisions, Welsh fitness levels, Scotland’s lead-up, Dwyer on the Wallabies performance and the All Blacks jersey debate…

Pitch Size Matters

Can someone please tell me why there is a maximum pitch size but no minimum size. In recent years both the Osprey and Wasps have played blitz defences on small pitches and reduced rugby to a hit-athon…

Reason’s Round-Up

Our resident journo’s weekly round up of news from around the rugby world, this week featuring: Shane William’s believes, England’s midfield tactics, injury fears in lead up to World Cup and how many players can a coach rest before it becomes a scandal?…

The Four Basics

In this short video by All Black Captain Richie McCaw he describes the four simple things he thinks he needs to do well to be a good rugby player…

The Best in the World

It’s always interesting to select a World XV heading into a World Cup and then see how much it might have changed by the end of the competition. The players who often come through are from the smaller nations. We simply haven’t seen them play enough rugby at the top level to know how good they are…

Reason’s Round-Up

Our resident journo’s weekly round up of news from around the rugby world, this week featuring: USA looses key World Cup player, the return of Stephen Ferris, South Africa’s loss to the Wallabies, the All Blacks starting line-up and Rugby World Cup ticket pricing…

What's bugging Wayne Smith?

Laws that promote negative play make a lot of coaches want to throw rugby’s rulemakers under the deck of a scrummage machine. I am not talking about the laws that stop good, aggressive defence or the laws that hold attackers back from having an unfair advantage. I am talking about those laws that strangle an opportunity to attack before it has even started…

Alignment

Language changes over time and one of the new buzz words in the All Blacks coaching set-up is ‘alignment’. Once upon a time if you had talked about alignment in rugby Dan Carter might have asked if you wanted him to stand flat or drop into the pocket. But in 2011 ‘alignment’ is about making sure the coaches, captain, leadership group and players are all headed in the same direction…