After writing a couple of weeks ago that I was really pleased with the quality and intensity early in this Super Rugby competition, along came this latest weekend.
What a hard watch, perhaps Brumbies apart. And speaking of hard watches, the Blues are definitely that at the moment. To meit's a twofold thing - half of it is the fault of the players, and half of it is the game plan they are trying to follow.
I have sympathy with John Kirwan because he's not out there on the field telling the players, who have just strung together 14 phases and have the opposition scrambling, to kick the ball back to them. He can't control that or the players knocking the ball on and making poor decisions. He might have done some amazing things on field as a player but he's not superhuman.
I heard Luke Braid after the game being interviewed. He was asked about the pressure that would come on to JK and he said the players have to take responsibility and I agree. It's not all the fault of the coaching staff. The players aren't covering themselves in glory either. But, having said that, there are some deficiencies in their game plan, in my opinion.
Other teams use their forwards among backs as link runners, or if they run off the ruck they use width. The Blues at the weekend ran very close to the ruck and into very heavy traffic. Halfback Jimmy Cowan was trying to get things going by taking a few steps then using his runners but they needed to be twice as wide with some depth variation. If you keep running into big bodies you will eventually cough the ball up. That's one part of the game plan which isn't helping.
Look at the backs. Apart from Cowan there's no one there with genuine experience. Charles Piutau, Francis Saili and Frank Halai have some limited All Black experience but on the whole they are very young. There's no one controlling the tempo. They look like a team stacked full of talent relying on that talent to work a miracle rather than a coherent structure to create space.
What's the answer? To me the best thing they can do is sit down after their fourth loss in a row and say "look, we may have persevered with what we worked on in the off-season, but it's not working". They need to come up with something different that suits the team. I don't know what's going on in the camp so I'm reluctant to say it's anyone's fault but there is a fault.
All of this is my personal opinion looking in from the outside. It doesn't necessarily make me right. But if I was in that predicament I would get everyone, not just the senior players because they don't have that many, together and ask "how are we going to play, boys?".
I've heard a lot of criticism directed at JK recently. He's on the pedestal, the head coach, but it's easy to make him a scapegoat and I think that's unfair. Everyone has to take responsibility - the players for their performances and the coaches for a game plan which in my opinion isn't quite right.
