1985

The Australian tour in 1984 has challenged the way I thought about notating the game and my own coaching.

In the two games I notated in the 1985 Five Nations Championship, I tried to extend the ways in which I recorded detail and made real-time notes about tactical variation. The games were:

• France v Scotland. 16 February. Referee: Laurie Prideaux (England). France won 11v3. Cold, windy day. Hard ground.
• Scotland v Wales. 2 March. Referee: Rene Hourquet (France). Wales won 25v21. Warm day. Firm ground.

France v Scotland

I tried to measure passages of play accurately in this game but the live broadcast made it difficult to do so. I saw this as a first attempt. I did note there were only three passages of play in the entire game that lasted more than 20 seconds. The two French tries came from short passing sequences.

Scotland chose to play with the wind in the first half. The French pressured Scotland 10's dominant right foot at kicks. In the second half, Scotland's kicking pattern changed when 9 was replaced by player wearing shirt 19. He kicked into the wind 5 times after coming on.

I started to record the sequence of set piece play. My notes recorded that France put the ball into two scrums in the first half. The second after 19 minutes.

The sequence of scrums in the game was:

• France 1 and 5 first half. 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 in the second. France lost scrum 19 against their feed.

Scotland reposition their No 8 at scrums on their own feed to counter French scrum pressure. 8 and 7 combined to move ball from the base of the scrum.

Both teams introduced lineout variation into their games. This prompted me to think about how I might record this variation. Two of the French 2 man lineouts were thrown long for the second jumper to catch going backwards. Scotland tried four-man as well as two-man lineouts. One of their four-man lineouts went long to 4th jumper. Scotland took one quick throw in.

Scotland v Wales

This was the first time I tried to provide a real-time qualitative text description and accurate time duration of what I termed activity cycles.

I recorded 97 activity cycles in the game. The longest activity cycle was 57.51s from a Welsh lineout late in the second half. This was one of the eight activity cycles that was longer than 29s in the game.

82% of the game was played in activity cycles of 20s or less. Scotland had 52 activity cycles (25 first half, 27 second half) and Wales 45 ((24 first half, 21 second half).

My quantitative summary of the notation is: