1984

Introduction

In 1984, the England team used St Mary's College as their training ground before international games. I monitored England's performances in this Five Nations Championship. At the end of the year, I followed Australia's tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland with great interest. My notes of the Wales v Australia game focussed on Australia's performance at set piece. This game started my thinking about how we might notate qualitative information.

I was keen to ensure that I could accurately record lineout throws and was increasingly interested in noting passes and phases of play (this started with the England v Ireland game). The Australian tour made this an important objective for me as a coach in order to understand how I might encourage expansive rugby. It was at this time I started thinking about rugby handball as an athletic endeavour that had implications for ball in play. I continued to monitor kicks by shirt number to get a feel for the structure of a tactical kicking game that might be led by 15 or 10 with the help of left footed kickers in the centre. I started noting kick offs and restarts and where they landed.

I have a record of five games in 1984:

• Scotland v England, 4 February. Referee: David Burnett (Ireland). Scotland won 18v6. Raining during the game, muddy pitch with breeze. (Google Sheet)
• England v Ireland, 18 February. Referee: Rene Hourquet (France). England won 12v9. (Google Sheet)
• England v Wales, 17 March. Referee: J. Anderson (Scotland). Wales won 24v15. Cold, dry day, no wind. (Google Sheet)
• England v Australia, 3 November. Referee: Bob Francis (New Zealand). Australia won 19v3. Fine, sunny day, some wind, good grassy pitch.
• Wales v Australia, 24 November. Referee: Owen Doyle (Ireland). Australia won 28v9. Wet day, muddy pitch.

England did not score a try in the four games I notated. They did score two tries in the game against France.

Scotland v England

England v Ireland

England v Wales

England v Australia

Wales v Australia

My analysis of the England v Australia game sent me off thinking about how Australia structured their game. It was interesting to see the responsibility Michael Lynagh took for Australia's kicking game from shirt 12. In the second half, Mark Ella at 10 did not kick the ball. I was very interested in Australia's lineout variation. I noted too that England had nine stoppages for injury compared to Australia's two stoppages.

For the Wales v Australia game, I changed my notation to a tactical observation of Australia's play. It was quite difficult to do this after four years of real time notation.

The game time was 43min 40s (first half) and 43min 21s (second half). Ball in play time was 13min 22s (first half) and 12min 23s (second half).

My notes from the game looked at lineout variation and a scrum play.