Brian Ashton and the art of creative rugby
The former Fylde scrum-half accepts the need for balance and feels the England team which won the World Cup – with whom he played a leading role until the year before – found it perfectly.
“Some players think they need a game plan to go out and put into action,” he said. “What you actually need is a framework of how you want your team to play.
“That is what the 2003 team had and the players were free to interpret that framework on the pitch – as they saw fit.
“Sometimes we would want to close a game down, sometimes you want to kick more and other times you want to open up.
“And we would allow the players to do that. It wasn’t the ones most people would think either.
“Guys like Matt Dawson, Will Greenwood and Mike Catt had the ability to call things as they saw them on the field.
“They understood how to play rugby.”
And that came from practice making perfect. If there is anything that makes his blood boil, it is the extension of a prescriptive mindset from the field of play to the training paddock.
Just use the word “drill”: “I have long held the view that the method of coaching used throughout the country, indeed across the world, has been inappropriate for players and their understanding of the game.
“Particular skills learned in isolation have no relevance to what happens in the 15-man game.
“I accept the need for technique to be practised on a regular basis but I think that should be done in the setting of a game while it is being played.
“In Italy we had guys who could do scrum drills, lineouts, two on ones, three on twos like no one else. They were superb at them.
“But when it came to applying the theory in a live situation their understanding was far more limited than in England.”
That’s when he and Villepreux began to think about running sessions in game-setting, with a focus on one aspect of play in attack and one in defence.
And just as possession turns over in a match, so too it did in training and, as players became used to switching roles, they also became more and more au fait with how the game’s constituent parts added up to the total.
“Running drills isn’t coaching. It isn’t even teaching. It’s organising.
“Some coaches just do that for a whole season and don’t change from one week to the next.
“I wouldn’t say it’s depressing but ...”
