Irish Rugby Team: Over-Trained or Under-Skilled?
Listening to Neil Francis last night on Questions and Answers was quite reassuring in light of yesterday’s post. He thought that the Irish team looked flat, tired and over-trained. As I mentioned yesterday I do think Ireland’s preseason training was poorly planned and had the wrong focus. However if you ask me if the problems were down to over-training, I would say no.
Over-training definitely affects performance, you are tired cranky and not able to recover as quick as you normally would. You feel stale and uneasy primarily, the physical side of it is not as apparent. The Irish rugby team are playing so badly, that simply saying they are tired is not going to cover it. The co-ordination is gone, the flair is gone and most importantly the playing intelligence is way off. How many clever lines did you see being run? How many off-loads were there in the tackle? The Irish public may not love them but Brian O’ Driscoll was the only Irish player able to offload and Ronan O’ Gara the only player to judge a line break. Physically the Irish were able to contain France, John Hayes in particular having a fantastic game in the scrums.
The link between size and strength in rugby is as poorly understood as the relationaship between strength acquisition and skill usage. Power in the gym is useless without power transfer onto the pitch. I would love to know the training program the players went through. How much of it was pumping iron and how much was work aimed at power transfer.
The flip side to this debate is to look at the competitive year. The man on the street who is suddenly an expert on team preparation fails to see that if Ireland were going to be in the best shape for the World Cup, then the Heineken Cup and 6 Nations would be severely compromised. Whatever happened, the team were going to fall below expectations either at the world cup or in the Celtic League/Heineken Cup/6 Nations.
Peaking involves a trade-off. For the moment let’s cheer Ireland on against Argentina and put a few quid on a grandslam in 2008 - you’ll get a good price!
Posted 25.09.07