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Author Topic: Wales v England  (Read 1831 times)

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Mayor West

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Re: Wales v England
« Reply #15 on: Saturday 17-Aug-2019, 19:41* »
If you were Welsh you should be worried that the only time you scored shouldn’t have stood and other than that you didn’t come close against an experimental England side who didn’t look that interested.

Twickersman

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Re: Wales v England
« Reply #16 on: Saturday 17-Aug-2019, 23:11* »
I hope I am wrong, but I feel England rely on Billy Vunipola to much, especially when Mako isn't playing.

He is no doubt a great player, but for me a little one paced. Hopefully we can see him perform better with Curry at 7 and underhill at 6. That would really speed things up.

15 Daly. 14. Nowell 13. Slade 12. Manu T. 10. Farrell 9. Young's (boo) 8. Billy. 7. Curry. 6 Underhill / Wilson 5. Kruis 4. Super Mario 3. Kyle S 2. George 1. Manu vunipola
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ChequeredJersey

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Re: Wales v England
« Reply #17 on: Saturday 17-Aug-2019, 23:37* »
Guessing 11 is May?

Twickersman

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Re: Wales v England
« Reply #18 on: Sunday 18-Aug-2019, 03:15* »
Well spotted. Cheers

Domestos

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Re: Wales v England
« Reply #19 on: Sunday 18-Aug-2019, 09:04* »
A disappointing time. Neither side can take much satisfaction from these two games.

Next up, Ireland. What could possibly go wrong?

Quinky

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Re: Wales v England
« Reply #20 on: Sunday 18-Aug-2019, 09:51* »
I hope I am wrong, but I feel England rely on Billy Vunipola to much, especially when Mako isn't playing.

He is no doubt a great player, but for me a little one paced. Hopefully we can see him perform better with Curry at 7 and underhill at 6. That would really speed things up.

15 Daly. 14. Nowell 13. Slade 12. Manu T. 10. Farrell 9. Young's (boo) 8. Billy. 7. Curry. 6 Underhill / Wilson 5. Kruis 4. Super Mario 3. Kyle S 2. George 1. Manu vunipola

Agreed, it looked that way yesterday. And he is a one trick pony, who happens to be very good at that one trick. But what happens when he is nullified?

J Scott

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Re: Wales v England
« Reply #21 on: Sunday 18-Aug-2019, 19:35* »
I think the biggest loss for us was not having Curry he seems to energise our breakdown, Ludlum is good but a 6 for me and lets stop playing locks on the flank.  BV is a great player but can get lost if his impact is not felt early on, I think a different style of player wold have added to our attack Tom Curry, or someone like Dombrant would have run some supporting lines that were missing from our attack. 

nowexnavyquin

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Re: Wales v England
« Reply #22 on: Sunday 18-Aug-2019, 21:58* »
Something is wrong with citing system if the tackle by Biggar on Itoje is not picked up, made no attempt to tackle low just went straight above the shoulders.
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Yareet

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Re: Wales v England
« Reply #23 on: Monday 19-Aug-2019, 07:02* »
Something is wrong with citing system if the tackle by Biggar on Itoje is not picked up, made no attempt to tackle low just went straight above the shoulders.

Even worse was Owens on Heinz. Arm in the sling position, charged into a ruck and caused Heinz HIA.

The angle doing the rounds doesn’t show conclusively where he connected but given the HIA, head must have been a possibility.
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nowexnavyquin

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Re: Wales v England
« Reply #24 on: Monday 19-Aug-2019, 07:18* »
Even worse was Owens on Heinz. Arm in the sling position, charged into a ruck and caused Heinz HIA.

The angle doing the rounds doesn’t show conclusively where he connected but given the HIA, head must have been a possibility.

Something similar to what Scott Barrett got sent off for?

DOK

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fandg2

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Re: Wales v England
« Reply #26 on: Monday 19-Aug-2019, 09:20* »
I think the biggest loss for us was not having Curry he seems to energise our breakdown, Ludlum is good but a 6 for me and lets stop playing locks on the flank.  BV is a great player but can get lost if his impact is not felt early on, I think a different style of player wold have added to our attack Tom Curry, or someone like Dombrant would have run some supporting lines that were missing from our attack. 

Agree, playing with two out and out 6's, neither being a 6 1/2 meant we were second best at the breakdown all game. Don't think Dombrant would have been the answer though. EJ should have just bitten the bullet and played Kivesic

Yareet

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Re: Wales v England
« Reply #27 on: Monday 19-Aug-2019, 12:19* »
Something similar to what Scott Barrett got sent off for?

Not dissimilar but clearing a ruck rather than a “tackle”

https://twitter.com/cshipway8/status/1162730498013179905?s=21

DOK

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Re: Wales v England
« Reply #28 on: Monday 19-Aug-2019, 12:56* »
Owen Slot in the Times

England’s weak areas laid bare one month out from World Cup

Wales 13 England 6

Owen Slot, Rugby Correspondent
August 19 2019, 12:01am, The Times

Eddie Jones was asked after England’s defeat in Cardiff how he assessed his side’s progress in these formative pre-World Cup weeks and replied: “I don’t give marks out of ten.” Reassuringly unabashed, he then offered to mark them out of seven. England, he said, deserved a four.

Wales, meanwhile, who were on about a two out of ten a week ago, are now the No 1 team in the world rankings. Go figure.

For England, the crunch at the Principality Stadium on Saturday came in the last quarter when Jones had all but emptied his bench. Suddenly we had something close to a first-choice England XV. The 8-9-10-12 was Billy Vunipola, Ben Youngs, Owen Farrell and Manu Tuilagi; the second row was Saracens’ Maro Itoje-George Kruis combination that will surely start the big games; the front row was a Mako Vunipola short of maximum strength; and the back three was missing only Jonny May of the likely World Cup trio.

England were 10-6 down and this was a proper challenge: a quarter of a game to snatch a victory from Wales, who had done the opposite by taking off their first-choice players.

Soon, Youngs and Jamie George were dancing off down the blind side. Itoje was locked on to an intercept. Kyle Sinckler, the tight-head, was threading a grubber kick through. Yes, that was somewhat perplexing. Still, it contributed to the impression that the cavalry had arrived. “To be honest, I never felt vulnerable during the game,” Itoje said. To be honest, they rarely looked vulnerable, although nor did they make Wales look susceptible.

England had taken a power game to Cardiff and yet failed to blow Wales away. Apart from some driving lineouts that got shunted into touch, they did not look a lot like scoring. And yet Jones’s message afterwards was: don’t worry. This is all going to plan.

Maybe it is but one of the lessons was that, whatever your plan, Wales are a team who can destroy it. During this pre-World Cup phoney war, where the conditioning, selection and tactical strategies for every team are different, psychology remains an eternal influencer. The test of Wales’s spirit was in the way they dealt with that power, and the number of sets of defence that they went through to keep England tryless.

“They showed fantastic character and big cojones,” Warren Gatland, the Wales head coach, said. “That’s what this team was about.”

The foundation stone of performances like this remains, as ever, the granite Alun Wyn Jones. Dan Biggar has a galvanising spirit too, likewise Ken Owens.

It is the lore of the warm-up Test that the defeated coach insists that defeat is irrelevant but in victory, Gatland would have none of it. There is a high chance that Wales and England will meet in the quarter-finals of the World Cup and, as Gatland said, he would never want to go into that on a run of two recent defeats. “Psychologically, I knew how important this was,” he said.

In Cardiff, Wales were not especially accurate or penetrative in attack. However, as they turned up the intensity, which is a quality reflected in defence, you could see the likeness of the team who won the grand slam in March.

Meanwhile, from game one to two of this Wales double-header, England have stood still. Or, if anything, gone backwards. Jones claimed: “Today was almost the perfect World Cup prep game for us.”

His words are a reminder of two points: one, you can never predict what is going to come out of his mouth; two, these games are hard to assess because the ground rules change, the planning department are trying to achieve more than a victory and it is not in their interest to share what that is.

Jones said: “We deliberately set it up, putting our young team out to test their mentality. I thought they handled it well.”

That may be so. My view is that testing the young team should have happened earlier in the year, not now when it would be too late to discover if, mentally, they can handle it or not. If it was a perfect prep game, it was maybe less for a smooth transition of any processes and tactics from the training ground to the pitch, and more because it provided a reminder of where England are prone to faltering. Some of this game looked a bit England 2018, the year the wheels came off, when England were exposed at the breakdown.

They came to Cardiff with a monstrous pack but without balance or pace. It was a great game, then, for Sam Underhill and Tom Curry because it showed how quickly England falter in their absence. Six days after his debut, Lewis Ludlam was not the man — or no longer had the legs — for the job.

Too often, one-up runners were exposed. Wales slowed down England’s recycle. Show some cojones against a one-dimensional England and you can stop them scoring a try. Or, indeed, looking anything like World Cup contenders.

This cannot be a worry for England because they simply will not go into a key World Cup tie attempting to play this way. Likewise, they have a month to improve their maul. Cardiff was hardly a work of art from England but there is a peculiar encouragement to be extracted because there are clear areas where they can be better.

Not so straightforward is how they win aerial battles. Wales could not have been clearer in their intentions to expose Elliot Daly at full back. Likewise, Jones could hardly have been clearer, over the past 12 months, that he sees Daly as his salvation at No 15.

It is not just Daly, though. England are obsessed with box-kicking down the line but rarely do they come out on top. And that is not a prep game, don’t worry, it’s-all-in-the-plan kind of issue.

May is decent under the high ball. So too Jack Nowell. Arguably England’s most consistent player over the past fortnight has been the resurgent Anthony Watson — and he may be the best high-ball man of them all.

Jones gets a bit antsy when it is suggested that Watson is the alternative at full back. I would suggest that England are more blessed in the back-three department than anywhere else and yet, conversely, there is a danger that they go to Japan with that area a weakness waiting to be exposed.

If Jones can solve that, if he can finish these warm-ups with one of the most dangerous back threes in the world, then maybe this will have been perfect World Cup prep after all.

DOK

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Re: Wales v England
« Reply #29 on: Monday 19-Aug-2019, 13:01* »
We have got tricks up our sleeve that we can’t reveal yet, says England coach Eddie Jones
Alex Lowe, Deputy Rugby Correspondent

August 19 2019, 12:01am, The Times

There were shades of the 2015 World Cup about how the game finished for England at the Principality Stadium. With two minutes remaining, they required a try to save the game and had a lineout deep in Wales territory.

Jamie George threw to Maro Itoje at the front, as England did to Chris Robshaw in that 2015 World Cup pool match. Four years ago, Wales responded by driving England into touch to seal the win and set the hosts on a path to an early World Cup exit.

On Saturday, England were spun again and ended up turning over the ball when the maul went to ground.

Billy Vunipola’s appeal that Wales had deliberately collapsed the maul was ignored by Pascal Gaüzčre, the referee. Wales had the scrum put-in and they had the match.

Eddie Jones, the England head coach, insisted that he was not in the slightest bit concerned.

England, he said, had been operating within certain parameters; their focus had been to play through the set piece, to keep any strike plays and innovations tucked firmly up their sleeve for the World Cup.

“We’ve got other options from the five-metre line which we won’t show for a while,” Jones said. “We want to get our tank going so it’s a bit easier to defend our maul when they know it’s coming. They did it very well and credit to Wales.”

Even so, from four England lineout drives inside the red zone, three ended in turnovers and one resulted in a penalty after Wales collapsed the maul. It was not a great return.

England had actually moved away from the tactic in the second half, with Ben Youngs preferring quick-tap penalties, but went back to it in the final two minutes after the scrum half was called back by the referee.

This weekend at Twickenham England face Ireland, one of the best mauling teams in the world. Jones promised a different strategy.

 

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