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Defense : The Great Opportunity for South Africa

Introduction

By committing to develop Defense as a Strategy, South Africa can win The 2007 World Cup and take the All Blacks out of the Number 1 Position in the IRB Rankings. We have the Player manpower and a huge pool of Black players to apply and win a high contact game.

This is going to take a paradigm shift in thinking. To beat the all Blacks we cannot copy them. That way, we end up as their B Team. We have to go past them. We must Develop a Game that is more physical than theirs, one that stops them dead in their tracks and flips them back onto their butts. Do this to them and I promise you - they will fold.

The ideas I am about to share with you are not original, I learned them in Gridiron Football from Black men and from players who took such pride in Defense that the man of the match sometimes never touched the ball.

I grew up just like you in Johannesburg and I learned Rugby just like you. Howeer whenI got to Gridiron I found that they did thigns differently. If you think the things that I am going to tell you in these pages are strange you can imagine how it was for me in the middle of the Apartheid Eighties, to find myself in a Team of 55 Nigerians where everbody wanted to get a piece of the White guy from South Africa.

The get the best of this article you are going to have to let go of most of ideas that you have cherished for 30 years. I am going to convince you that what we have learned and still train our kids today about Defense is Wrong!

The Gridiron Way

Google "Football Defense" and see hundreds of Videos and books come up for sale to teach you how to Defend. Google "Rugby Defense" - Nothing. Its as if, to Rugby, Defense simply doesn't exist. In South Africa the position of Defense Coach does not even exist, let alone the "Defense coaching team". Defense is the Head Coaches Hobby. We pay Lip service to it. We count "jump on your back" tactics as tackles, when in fact they are lost ground!

A Gridiron Team commits very close to half its budget on Defense. There are 30 Teams in the US spending $ 100 Million per year each Developing Defense. There are 200 College Teams spending in excess of $ 10 Million per year each on Defense. In contrast to this you find that the Springboks spend less that 10% of their budget or less than $ 1 Million per year on Defense. Its gotta make you think that maybe, just maybe, we have a lot to gain by improving our Defense.

Here comes the scary part - in The NFL, 70% of the Players are Black, but in the Defense over 90% of the Players are Black. Years of experiment and Billions of Dollars have proved that Pound for pound the average African Athlete is more powerful than the Equivalent European Athlete - fact. Defensive Players are smaller and more powerful, they rely more on explosive technique than on size to effect their Hit.

The Opportunity for South Africa is to tap into that huge pool of Black Players and Develop a game that plays to their strengths rather than our current strategy which plays to the Strength of our White Players. Translating this into Rugby Selection means that if we are going to pick half our teams on Defensive charateristics and 6 out of 7 of them are going to be black, then we should have a team of around 10 black players!. This is our huge opportunity, African are the one element that we have that the Other Rugby Nations do not. We squander it.

Our Top players lack basic Defensive Skills. Our coaches find it hard to tell a player that wears the Green and Gold and earns R 2 Million a year that he can't do somethign simple like tackle. This is a a strange concept to me. In Gridiron, individual coaching is a pillar of the system. Coaches spend hours one on one, honing indiviual skills. In South Africa we run a squad system. I squirm when I see player after player running through the same errors right in front of the coaches eyes. The coach is so busy keeping the Squad moving that he never stops to correct the individual error. No matter how good an athlete he is, it will take hours to learn back pedalling, linear tracking, 3 Point Stance, Exploding off the Ball, this is completely foreign to Rugby. In all the time that I have coached Rugby I have never seen individual sessions to coach tackling technique. Whenever I have tried to single out Rugby players for individual attention rather that thrive on the input, they regard it as some kind of victimisation. I never had this problem coaching Gridiron.

Gridiron Players spend 60% of the year training and 40% of the year Playing. Rugby Players spend 70% of the year playing and 30% of the year training. Unless we are prepared to put more into developing our players bodies none of what I explain in the rest of this article makes much sense. This is particularly relevant to Black and Coloured South Africans, who go into full contact against bigger White Opponents, without sufficient preparation. This is the reason that the injury rate amongst tehm is so high. We see the same pattern repeated. The player comes out, makes player of the year, plays worse the next season and goes downhill after that.

South Africa's Best Defenders

In my Opinion our Best Defenders are

 Efficiency

Now obviously its difficult to compare positions and Tackling Efficiency is not always as important as the quality of Hit that you give, so there is a lot of subjectivity. My rating is based on my assesment of technique. Goodness knows where these guys learned it, because most of the rest of South Africa is hapless.

Why I find my self so far from South African Coaches is that out of my top 5 Defensive choices, 3 of them play at Wing, where Defense is least important!

Conditioning

This is a huge subject. I can only summarise this by saying that without Conditioning we cannot even begin Defense. This is where we are in South Africa - Fat forwards and tiny backs. Most of our players have legs like Girls. The truth is they look like Girls because they train like girls. It borders on criminal to put our black players out there on the field in the condition that they are. Because we are tripping over ourselves to get Balck players onto the field, we put them out to play before they are ready. The trend on South Africa is to rush Black players out before their bodies are ready. Gridiron players get 4 years of college programs before entering the NFL at around 23. In particular our players need very intense Contact Conditioning programs. Its Very Sad.

A Defense COntact COndition program would include:

Vertical Squats Squats Deadlifts Cleans Snatch Bench Specailised Neck Exersises.

The Ins and Outs of The Rush and The Drift

Helmets and Pads

Tackling can be taught

3 Point Stance

Linebacker Stance

Diving

The Break Down

Philip Copeman

Philip Copeman has been coching Gridiron and Rugby for 20 years. He played for The Wits Vikings, The Pretoria Bulldogs and The London Ravens. He was Left Tackle for the SAAFA team for 10 years. Details of his training techniques can be found on his web site www.ironrugby.com