Keep Ball Alive mantra is the perfect antidote to the box-kicking virus

Brendan Fanning

Scrum-half Tawera Kerr-Barlow is a key part of Ronan O'Gara's La Rochelle side. Image credit: Sportsfile.

April 14 2021 02:00 PM

Just when we were getting to grips with KPIs having a regular place in rugby’s vocabulary, along comes Ronan O’Gara and throws another piece of luggage in the overhead rack.

So Key Performance Indicators now have KBA - Keep the Ball Alive - for company. And because it’s falling from the mouth of the currently hottest property on the rugby circuit, it has found immediate traction.

O’Gara began to appreciate fully the value of KBA when his coaching travels took him to Christchurch, and the Crusaders. That was three years ago, having completed an instructive four-year stint with Racing in Paris.

There had also been a quick spin to Japan with Joe Schmidt’s Ireland side – minus its Lions contingent – in the summer of 2017. So, three very different experiences lodged on his CV before heading to the vibrant French coastal city of La Rochelle. At which point their fortunes improve, and O’Gara is quick to join the dots between matching your game to your squad.

Not only does this make sense for him, it also makes for more fun. Rugby is a beautiful game when played to a rhythm where a breakdown is just as it sounds. This doesn’t mean having to start again is a disaster, but neither should it be your most frequent target.

This is a country mile from what O’Gara witnessed in his week with Schmidt in Japan. At the time the former out-half was raving about the detail of the game laid down by Ireland’s most successful coach, a year out from his stellar year of 2018. If O’Gara was unimpressed by the number of collisions, then he kept that bit to himself.

But while Ireland were putting their Grand Slam together O’Gara was off in New Zealand learning that not all Kiwis were driven by heavily choreographed rugby. You’d be kidding yourself if you thought the Crusaders made it all up as they went along, but much of their detail went into how they would keep the ball alive rather than how they would revive it when it had broken down.

The only thing new about this concept is that the Crusaders put an initialism on it: KBA. It governed the way they played. And because it was successful, and it was the Crusaders who were doing it, it had gravity. Also, it was an antidote to the box-kicking virus.

What’s especially welcome is its timing. Less than 24 hours after Leinster were showing champion class to dethrone the Chiefs on their Sandy Park reservation, Saracens were on duty in the RFU Championship where they ran up a big score against Bedford. To be honest, we’ve no idea what it looked like but it’s hard to get past 50 points by following the aerial route as your only path.

Only last September this was what Sarries had done so well in dumping Leinster out of the Heineken Champions Cup quarter-final. There was nothing new about the way they played, rather they had brought it to such a level of accuracy it was extraordinarily hard to withstand. The quality of players they had carrying out the plan was half the battle. Moreover, when you see players of that ability buying into the policy with such commitment you know it’s a powerful tool.

It was also dispiriting. Watching Richard Wigglesworth launching bombs prompted admiration of his clinical proficiency, but despair at the battle plan. Fair enough, they had the stats to back up a safety-first policy within sight of their own sticks, and had put in the man hours in combining accuracy of kick with highly organised and enthusiastic chases.

But what if it caught on? Or rather, what if lots of others became as good at it? Luke McGrath, at scrum-half for Leinster, passed the ball 95 times that afternoon. His opponent managed just over a third of that. If every scrum-half adopted the Saracens kick/pass ratio, we would tune out.

Rugby got to a point where the notion of holding onto slow ball and trying to make something momentous from it – maybe through footwork or shape - was a fool’s errand. Suggesting it made people look at you like you were on day release.

Yet here we are, at a point where having the ball is the healthy option on your menu. Well, it is if you have the constitution for it. Toulouse have it. So have La Rochelle. So have Leinster. They all have players with the intent to play the ball through the hand and the footwork to engineer some space. Significantly they all have a kicking game too.

The latter is where the real advance has been made, but typically we went mad for it and forgot about what made rugby great to watch in the first place: players running and passing the ball. That’s where it started.

Coincidentally, next month sees the 20th anniversary of Ulster’s first All-Ireland League win, when Willie Anderson’s Dungannon ran Cork Constitution off the park. It was one sided, which might not be what you want in a final, but it was a brilliant display where the point of attack was being shifted all the time.

Anderson had been preaching KBA before it became an initialism. Mind you, he had also been barking at players to get lower at the ruck, and caning them when their body positions didn’t meet his exacting standards. So he understood it was all about the mix.

There was room for violence and there was room for conflict avoidance, and both required technique that had to be practised endlessly. Ronan O’Gara may not have been too well equipped for the first bit of that equation, but he made up for it happily on the second.