Justin Marshall: How the Highlanders can win

Julian Savea of the Hurricanes on the attack during the round six Super Rugby match between the Highlanders and the Hurricanes. Photo / Getty Images.

This is the final nobody was picking at the start of the season but that doesn't mean no body wanted to see it. In fact, these are the only two teams I want to see competing in the final.

It's not just the results, though that is the ultimate determinant, but the way they play the game. It's captured the public's imagination, and not just in the Wellington and Otago regions.

This column will focus on the biggest strength of the home side and how important it is for the Highlanders to nullify it.

The Hurricanes biggest strength is they have players right across the park who can bust tackles. This has become the key attacking stat for coaches, rather than clean breaks and defenders beaten. Nobody is better in Super Rugby than the Hurricanes at busting that first tackle.

The reason it is so important is it immediately ruins the integrity of defensive systems. As soon as another player has to leave his slot to help a teammate effect a tackle, the defensive line is compromised. All of sudden you have a whole line of defenders worrying about somebody else's job.

You can hang on for a while like that -- covering each other's arses -- but eventually the strain will show and holes will appear.

Julian Savea has busted 75 tackles this year. That's 75 times somebody else has had to leave their station to help his defender bring him down. Nehe Milner-Skudder has busted 57 tackles, while Ardie Savea and Ma'a Nonu are in the high-40s.

Victor Vito and Dane Coles are also terrific tackle busters.

teams that have this ability in so many individuals can then create try-scoring opportunities without having to be particularly tactical or manipulative. Simple double-miss moves or one-three dummy cuts to hit No 12 are about as fancy as you have to get, because the tackle busts bring in those players running good support lines.

Which brings us on to TJ Perenara. The guy is a try-scoring freak, with 11 this season, and the vast bulk of them are from getting to the point on a field where he knows his attacking runner is going to get to and taking simple offloads and passes.

If anything, I believe Perenara sometimes gets a bit ahead of play and is too far in front to take a pass because he has so much confidence in his ball-runners ability to break tackles. With a little more refinement in his support play, he'll get even greater benefits.

The Hurricanes are head-and-shoulders above any other team in this respect and you might ask, with minimal player turnover from last season, why it has only suddenly come to the fore.

This is where the draw, which most teams would have seen as a curse, came to their advantage.

They started the season with a tour of South Africa and the coaches recognised that it was potentially a sink-or-swim situation. Come back with a couple of wins and the confidence that flowed through the squad would be infectious. Get beaten and the sense that another long season was ahead would have been difficult to dispel.

So they used the pre-season to come up with a playing style that was not only different, but was built to win in a difficult environment. They knew everybody would expect Nonu, back after three years, to be the focal point of the attack, but Chris Boyd and John Plumtree actually wanted a plan that would take the stress off the midfield to some extent -- they didn't want to fall into the just-chuck-it to Nonu trap.

They wanted to get the ball into wider channels and use the mobility of Coles, and their locks and loosies to their advantage. It worked from the outset and everybody bought into it. You can see it has brought the best out of players like Brad Shields, Blade Thompson, James Broadhurst and Jeremy Thrush.

So, briefly, what to the Highlanders do to counter? Well it's bloody easy to articulate, far more difficult to actually do.

They have to to mark up well and make accurate, dominant first-up tackles. If they don't miss, the Hurricanes will not get their roll-on and Perenara's effectiveness will be severely blunted.

They have to be relentless at this facet. They can't just rely on going low and chopping the Hurricanes down either, because they'll start offloading in the tackle, which opens up news sets of possibilities.

This is where the the final will be won and lost.