Really good read on Nick Evan’s in the times< Friends of the Stoop have all the stats on their page but here’s the article
England have turned to “Snapper” to find more bite in attack. Behind that slightly corny introduction is one of the great fascinations of this new new England team.
We say new new because Eddie Jones told us all his “New England” would be brilliant, and then they weren’t, so this is new new, or new mark two.
Anyway, “Snapper” is Nick Evans — the legendary Harlequins fly half who became a fine coach after his retirement from playing. They call him “Snapper” as he loves fishing. He reckoned if he had not been such a good fly half (our words, not his) he would have been a deep-ocean fisherman in New Zealand, chartering boats into the Pacific.
Now Evans is in the deep with England and tasked with sorting out their floundering attack (OK, that’s enough fishing puns). Here at the Maul we’re interested in how this all fits together with Borthwick’s masterplan. We’ll take you through “speed over shape”, “Bozo” drills and “landmarks”; three key pillars of the Evans and Harlequin way that may come into England’s Six Nations campaign.
Trust your instincts
First things first, and let’s tackle an assumption. The prevailing narrative is that Cavalier Evans will sit in stark contrast to the Roundheads of Borthwick, defence coach Kevin Sinfield, and forwards man Richard Cockerill.
Actually, Borthwick and Evans share a fair bit — especially data from Oval Insights, a company which gathers reams of information on players, and they both use it to influence their selections and styles.
Of course, Quins and Borthwick’s old Leicester team play very differently; although any conjecture that the Harlequins style is all loose, unplanned and reckless is wide of the mark. Evans is a meticulous trainer, and drills this “instinctiveness” and “heads-up” way into his players.
Before we tell you how, have a look at how he helped improve Harlequins’ attacking numbers after the departure of Paul Gustard.
The former Quins head coach lost his job in January 2021. He had Evans as an attack coach, but the team lost their licence to thrill — so to speak — as Gustard tried to implement a more conservative gameplan. When he went, the “coaching committee” of Evans, Jerry Flannery, Adam Jones and Charlie Mulchrone came together under the guidance of Billy Millard, and look what happened.
Tries scored, line-breaks, tackle evasion and carry dominance all improved remarkably. Metres made recovered to previously high levels and Quins won the title in swashbuckling style come June 2021.
Now those statistics, which have remained similarly good since Tabai Matson came on board in July 2021, can be linked to André Esterhuizen, the South African centre, finding his feet.
He signed in 2020 but started firing in 2021 — and look again at the numbers, and how he influenced the uplift in carry dominance, tackle evasion and line-breaks. That was either by crashing through the midfield himself or putting others in space. For England 2023, read Manu Tuilagi.
The other element that makes Harlequins’ free-looking attack work is the scrum. With Joe Marler and Wilco Louw to the fore, Quins have one of the best and cleanest scrums in the league.
Their scrum coach — the former Wales and British & Irish Lions prop Jones — tells us: “As the French say, ‘No scrum, no win.’ If you’re playing off 100 per cent scrum ball, or 90 per cent, it gives the backs to play off it, and plan. It’s easier for Snapper when he knows we’re going to win the ball. It’s tougher than it looks to have a good scrum, but having a solid platform is key.”
And, actually, it is not just about attacking up front either. “Internationally, if you have the mindset to scrum for penalties the whole time you’ll probably lose a few,” Jones adds. “We’ve got a mindset where as we’ve got so good backs you don’t want to scrum for a penalty every time as we want to use Marcus Smith, Danny Care, Joe Marchant. Fortunately we can have a crack in the scrum and with the backs.”
So, England need to shore up their scrum, hence Dan Cole’s inclusion, so their backs can thrive. In 2022, England had the worst scrum of all top ten Test-playing nations. Solve that and they unlock Evans’s attack, as well as much else.
Speed over shape
When asked about the qualities Borthwick admires in Evans’s system, the England head coach said: “The thing that stands out is the speed.” That bears out in the numbers. Here are the average attacking ruck speeds in the Premiership this season. Harlequins are right up there with the quickest.
This leads us on to that phrase we mentioned at the top: “Speed over shape.”
That is the name Harlequins give to what we might call “momentum” or “playing on top” — essentially it means reacting quickly to those moments in games that you must take. Something breaks open, and you’re away. Quins prioritise playing quickly over having an assigned shape, as Matson explains.
“It’s moments in a game where an opportunity has come,” he says. “And generally it is when someone has dominated the gainline. You can do that in heaps of different ways — through side-stepping through a gap like Joe Marchant, battering the castle door down like an André Esterhuizen, or a well-run play down the short side.
“Ultimately the defence has to respond and normally narrows to where the breach is. It is about your ability to respond in unison.
“Nick is probably the best I’ve seen coaching momentum. You hear, ‘They’re a momentum team, and are really good when they get on the front foot,’ and he’d be one of the best in teaching teams how to create it, and when you get it what does it look like, and how do you play on top?
“Defences are so well organised that, ultimately, you need a couple of moments in the game where you just can’t respond quick enough [to an attack]. Often that’ll be the difference in a Test match or big Premiership game. If they give him the resources to do that, England will move forward in that part of the game.”
There are two ways Harlequins coach this. The first is drilling them to recognise “landmarks”.
Matson calls them that, using the analogy that if you and your friends are in Paris, and are trying to meet up, you will ring each other and talk about where you are in relation to the Eiffel Tower: “I’m two blocks from the Eiffel Tower”; “I’m over the river from it”; “I’m underneath it” and the like.
In games, there are many moments where players in a backline see different opportunities — one wants to run, one to kick, the other to carry, for example — but there are some where everyone suddenly has the same idea, the same picture in their mind. “It’s when everyone responds because they see the same landmark,” Matson explains.
“That’s when the magic happens. Immediately you all recognise what to do, and where everyone is. It’s the responding in unison, and realising you have momentum that’s the key . . . the, ‘Oh jeez, we’re on top, I don’t know how that happened, but we’re in behind, and they’ve squeezed there, and, bang, that’s the moment.’ ”
So Evans wants his players to see the same “landmarks” and respond to them more often. He trains this with a game called “Bozo” — a bit like rugby’s version of the “Rondo” drill in football, where defenders are in the middle against attackers looking for spaces to pass round them on the outside.
Cadan Murley — the Harlequins, and now England, wing — explains: “There are three teams of nine people. You play the full width of a pitch, and when you make a touch as a defender you have to run back to your tryline, so it opens up bigger spaces.
“It’s heads-up rugby. The teams swap in and out, and it’s gruelling. You do about 90 seconds to two minutes in the middle before swapping out. It’s identifying space and mismatches. As a winger, if there’s three-on-three, but two are front-rowers against me, Joe Marchant and Josh Bassett, we take that every time.
“It’s a mismatch, we can get outside of one player and create a three-on-two. It’s little things like that, learning to be able to scan [quickly looking left and right], identify space and call it when it’s on.”
It works. In the past 3½ seasons, since the start of the 2019-20 campaign, Quins have the best record of any Premiership team at taking chances. That is measured by the points they score per entry to the opposing 22.
Of course, the final element — the most important — is how this works in practice. Owen Farrell is likely to be England’s fly half, who clearly plays differently to Smith of Harlequins. Farrell is less of a threat breaking the gainline himself, but he does find ways to plough through traffic better than Smith.
It will be fascinating to see how Evans melds all this into England, whether the national team take to his ways — and whether opponents fall for his tricks, hook, liner and sinker.
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