Practice the skill, not the drill.
‘I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone…’ Alan Bennett, The History Boys.
This is something I have often come up against in my few years: a yearning to impress the coach through perfecting a formula for ‘2-on-1' drills, or to smash the stationary bag-man back 10 metres, and side-step thin air.However, in my more recent years as a player and when I was being coached outside of my school, I have found that coaches spend far too long on drills and ‘practices’ , or rather ‘run-throughs’, that IMHO have absolutely no use whatsoever when the all important match day comes around. I am by no-means here slandering the notion of a run-through, rather the way in which it is carried out and the frequency. I have taken part in some that can be of great value. Having said this, if you took a wide range of rugby-playing children and adults and asked them to describe their run-through session it would sound something like this: ‘The starting team line up to attack, which they do for around 20 minutes so as to perfect their moves and plays, with the substitutes ready to defend.’ So far, so good. Right? Wrong. This is how the majority of run-throughs will take place across our rugby-founding nation. My first issue with this? The fact that a run-through contains no shred of defensive practice. You will spend more time in a game defending than you will completing any set-piece moves or any other beautifully drawn combination. Why do we assume knowledge in this particular aspect of the game? I mean this seriously, why is this aspect (team defence) as good as forgotten to most people? I will discuss defence more in another blog, for now we’ll leave it to one side.My other two main issues with this are that attackers are able to run for as long as they like creating an unrealistic scenario, and finally that the defence provided is too passive. Attackers completely forget their existance and show no intent whatsoever to challenge them which for me is the essence of attacking: challenging the defence, asking questions of them in order to create space.
Most players will tell you that they spend around 20 minutes give-or-take on these each training session. Could any of these same players honestly say that they use these moves for any more than even a minute during the game? I honestly do not think so. It was the all important aspect of county training sessions and it has proved to be the case at university, yet why do coaches persist on drumming these into us when we could spend the time doing game relative training? I should explain what I define as game relative training so as to avoid sounding like a whining man at your local watering hole. I would describe game relative training as parts of the session in which you spend time working in the ‘whole’, whether it be on defence, attack, or counter attack. Forwards, backs, all working together in attack and defence. This is done through a series of conditioned games and is a fantastic way to train. I have never felt so sharp or so confident in a side as when we have trainned in this way. This ensures that the ‘whole’ understand the ways in which one would go about challenging defences through facing an active defence. What is more is that yo gain this crucial time spent defending.
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