Pressure

As another year slips into the mists of time, the Grand Old Man talks about pressure, not without misty eyes. Nostalgia is such a precious commodity.

Pressure is a major component of any sport. In rugby we talk about putting the opponents under pressure. As a young forward 150 years ago, I was fortunate to have as coaches two astute men (I thought they were old men in those days but I now realise they were reasonably young.) One was a forward, the other a back. The back was an international, the forward a very tough, wily provincial loose forward, a great captain in his playing days. Both had been through the Second World War and could not tolerate softness in themselves or in others. The back died in this last year, the forward is too tough to die and still marches on, strongly.

We were a light university side blessed with wonderful running skills and we played in the days when most of our opponents believed there were only two ways to play young university students. 1. Beat them up, using the odd fist if necessary. 2. Keep the ball tight and out-muscle them. In that way they put us under pressure - intense physical pressure. Late tackles were part of the game then, and so were high tackles. Both our coaches knew what was going on and realised the nasty sort of pressure we were under. Our game plans were always simple: the forwards had to stick it out, come what may, whilst the backs had to run us out of trouble into attack. We used to say that if you gave us one third of the ball, then we would win the game - and that is the way it was. It was glorious to drag my loosehead face out of the mud where it had been put by a burly 260-pounder of a tighthead (I tell no lie), somewhere in our own half, to see our wings crossing the line in the opponents' corner!

It is fair to say that nearly all our forwards were runners and could handle the ball; we had to be quick thinkers and movers. Support for one another was of all importance. The pressure on us was so tight, the opposing backs so flat (remember that in those days the ball in a scrum was the off-side line and a line-out could stretch across the field with no fifteen-metre line while the backs in defence could line up with their forwards in a defensive line across the field), that, if we crossed the tackle line, which was very much the same as the advantage line, we cracked the entire defence but for the full back and the covering blindside wing. (That was a long sentence in an effort to emulate the backs running the length of the field!) We dealt with the cover defence through our support play. It was important for us to pass before or, at very least, in a tackle so that we could remain on our feet and support. Clever sides who realised this tried to tackle us early or late to keep us out of the support role. More often than not we penetrated from first phase play and we relied on the feet of our backs - most of them were steppers - and their fleetness of foot to carry us the length of the field, which they did, time and again. In this way, we pressurised our opponents, who were much stronger and bigger than we were and, most of the time, we won.

There were a couple of years in mid to late fifties when we went through a terrible time playing dreadful orthodox rugby and we were mashed, until, one afternoon, the forward coach stalked into our dressing-room for his pre-match talk. It was a very simple talk. He said something like this: I dont know why you buggers play rugby; you dont seem to enjoy it. Now get out there, chuck that ball around, have fun and too bad if you lose.

He had realised, of course, that our deep desire to win, to live up to the glorious standards of our post-war predecessors, had put too much pressure on us, or rather, we had put it on ourselves. All our flair, our innovativeness, had been blunted by this must-win complex.

Well, as in the story books, we won that game in carefree fashion &and never looked back again, or, as the story book says, lived happily ever after. Tom, the coach, understood his young charges, realised their enormous potential, the pressure they had put themselves under and had been put under - and he released them from the spell. He ordered us to go out there and play with abandon, knowing that our innate talent and skill would take over.

There followed years of thrilling and successful university rugby , rugby that despite the political times, produced many international and provincial players of world class.

The strange thing about rugby is that in an ironic way, the more pressure you put yourself under in attack, the more successful your attack is likely to be. For example, if you are going to pull off a reverse pass in the backline and you do it too early, it comes to nothing. If, however, you delay the pass until their backs have you under pressure and then reverse the pass, you are likely to be successful. That is worth thinking about. In the old days when the off-side lines were cruel, backs had little to no room, yet they broke defence lines as backs nowadays cannot. Scrumhalf passes had to be quick, flyhalves had opponents on them as they received the ball as the loose forwards and the opposing scrumhalf could follow the ball around the scrum and loose scrum, so they were following the pass closely - hesitate and you were dead. You had to be class to be an inside back. The laws of course do not allow for a fifty-fifty ball contest. If you have the ball now, the laws favour you to keep it and so you get more and more of these interminable phases, much loved by the simple. It is true that now we do play much of our rugby under pressure but it is pressure we put ourselves under in order to play the game but also to restrict individual flair and talent that might conflict with the brain-washed rugby of modern coaches.

Forgive just a few nostalgic thoughts at the end of a year and a deep desire to see that ball moving again.