Quality of Aviva Premiership continues to fall?

After round 6 of the HC, when we had seen 3 of the current top 4 teams marmalised by irish opponents, I wrote a long, rather depressed piece about the state of the Aviva Premiership and what i perceived to be the low quality of skills etc.

Since then we have had the 6Ns - in which results if not always performances were promising for England - which disrupted the club season. Since the 6Ns we have had two rounds of matches some of which have been high on excitement, but from the games I have seen still desperately low on quality:



Quins v Bath
A match that looked like a pre-season warmup. Played at half speed, neither side actually looked interested in playing.

Saints v Wasps
For 40 minutes Saints seemed uninterested. They were being well beaten in the scrum yet led at halftime as Wasps were incapable of tackling.

LI v Tigers
Entertaining, but again not a match of great quality.

Tigers v Worcester
Tigers passing was awful. Men were standing still and then trying to put pace on the ball. Tigers were really poor. That they scored 7 tries shows just how bad Worcester were.

Sarries v Quins
Sarries passing made Tigers the night before look slick. In possession they were pedestrian, lateral and seemed to prefer passing to the crowd than to a player. Quins spent the whole match offside and wrapping their hands round the ball at the breakdown. While the ref was nervous and pedantic, he was also very kind to Quins indeed. Even more men could/should have been binned (though I thought Easter was unlucky) and the first two tries could very easily have been disallowed for a big forward pass and blatant blocking.



I really, really hope that next weekend the English clubs still involved in European competitions can put a smile back on my face and deliver some good performances.

All average sides though. Wait for Gloucester to perk you up later today, as the best player in the world (Jonny May) cuts through Wasps like a knife through butter.

To be fair all European club rugby (aside for a few sides) has been pretty crap. Most teams only seem to be putting in the good performances for the HC cup.

I thought the weekends rugby was quite good.

It'll always be tricky to get the best out of the club teams as the squads have to keep mixing up and changing. If we just had the prem uninterrupted, then HC and then the internationals I think we'd see a lot better rugby as the squads got an unbroken run of games to gel.

And also do the players train enough on passing and running drills?

All the team training articles I read seem to focusthe majority of training time on fitness and weights/stamina/contact sessions, but sometimes I think the guys could do with 60 mins of touch rugby on a smaller pitch to force them to work on out smarting defences.

I don't think the referee was kind to Quins- true we were offside and deserved all 3 Yellows for me (and the first try was a forward pass, but the kind that is now treated as "lateral" in the game, rightly or wrongly), but we also had some marginal at best calls go against us in the rucks, there were no other penalties that merited cards (those given were because of constant infringement anyway!) and every time a Sarries player made a break (happened a fair bit, both sides towards the end tried to play a lot of rugby) and a Quin made a covering tackle, there was another Quin there well before any Sarries players and the Sarries player tackled never ever gave up the ball and was never penalised! Plus in several rucks our ball was slowed down in a way that in my amateur opinion as a cheating 6 could only have been due to Sarries hands in the rucks. These calls went both ways.

Also it may interest you to know that of my friends that went to watch the match, 5 were casual watchers of rugby at best (1 only learnt the rules this 6N because they thought Leigh Halfpenny was hot and another hadn't watched a whole match before). All of them thought the game was good, entertaining and are more interested in the sport because of it. Quins vs Bath I agree was a poor game, the others I can't speak for but Sarries vs Quins was not

As I said, the matches were exciting and entertaining - but the quality in my opinion was low - at times very low.

As to hands in the ruck - Quins have so far proven themselves the experts at it. The match in Toulouse was the best example I have seen of sides "legally" slowing down the ball since Munster and Leicester were in their HC winning pomp.

EnglishReign wrote:All average sides though. Wait for Gloucester to perk you up later today, as the best player in the world (Jonny May) cuts through Wasps like a knife through butter.

Mmm but you didn't take into account Elliot Daly who has shooting boots from the half way line.

Launchbury & Daly will be with May in an England team of the ( hopefully) near future.

Hey, I didn't say that we didn't do it, just that trying to say we got away with things that Saracens didn't is inaccurate

DW about it.

yappysnap wrote:I thought the weekends rugby was quite good.

It'll always be tricky to get the best out of the club teams as the squads have to keep mixing up and changing. If we just had the prem uninterrupted, then HC and then the internationals I think we'd see a lot better rugby as the squads got an unbroken run of games to gel.

+1

BigTrevsbigmac wrote:

EnglishReign wrote:All average sides though. Wait for Gloucester to perk you up later today, as the best player in the world (Jonny May) cuts through Wasps like a knife through butter.

Mmm but you didn't take into account Elliot Daly who has shooting boots from the half way line.

Launchbury & Daly will be with May in an England team of the ( hopefully) near future.

Tbf I was right about May though! Sounds like it was a better game than most anyway, well done on the win .

LondonTiger wrote:As I said, the matches were exciting and entertaining - but the quality in my opinion was low - at times very low.

As to hands in the ruck - Quins have so far proven themselves the experts at it. The match in Toulouse was the best example I have seen of sides "legally" slowing down the ball since Munster and Leicester were in their HC winning pomp.

But what do you mean by 'quality'? I thought the Wembley game was both entertaining and contained some excellent skills - the Quins tries were well worked and if it hadn't been for some quite brilliant (or 'high quality' if you prefer it) defending Sarries would have opened Quins up with their passing several times. Yes Wyles threw the ball into touch a couple of times at the end of passing moves looking for the decisive pass, but that doesn't make the whole game average.

Elsewhere I thought Saints played well against Bath, and I really enjoyed the LI - Leicester game. At the end of the day I want to see close games with good skills. There will always be some ordinary games and Quins - Bath was a shocker, but having just seen the tries Sale scored against Newcastle I'm not sure there's any evidence the 'quality' is dropping.

The fact that so many teams have shown themselves incapable of passing and catching a ball while running indicates low quality. The horrible tendency to run sideways in attack, or even worse throw the huge mis-pass when you had a 2 man overlap and butcher the opportunity, or even worse than that this new trend of passing the ball to the crowd.

Perhaps it is mainly my team and the matches they have played in, but so often this season the most basic of skills have been lacking.

Elliot Daly was a schoolboy last year and already looks one of the better centres out there

I watched a delayed broadcast of the Saracens match last night.

On thing in paricular I saw was that their back line runs from very deep and when they get ready to pass it isn't slick.

It looks like they are preparing to offload a bomb and first has to coil before the release.

LondonTiger wrote:The fact that so many teams have shown themselves incapable of passing and catching a ball while running indicates low quality. The horrible tendency to run sideways in attack, or even worse throw the huge mis-pass when you had a 2 man overlap and butcher the opportunity, or even worse than that this new trend of passing the ball to the crowd.

Perhaps it is mainly my team and the matches they have played in, but so often this season the most basic of skills have been lacking.

Sorry, I disagree. I don't think so many sides have shown themselves 'incapable of catching and passing a ball while running'. The faults you describe have always been there, in English and other rugby and I think all you are doing is noting that all games of rugby aren't great.

Now it's true Tiger's aren't the most fluid of sides when Twelvetrees isn't playing, but to write-off the Wembley game (which featured some excellent tries and some really fantastic defence) because Wyles threw the ball into touch a couple of times under pressure is ridiculous.


The Wasps - Gloucester game had some lovely tries in it btw.

Croyman wrote:
Elliot Daly was a schoolboy last year and already looks one of the better centres out there

Can he play 12 or is he an out and out 13?