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Why Boredom is the Crusaders' Secret Weapon
The Crusaders will bore you to death, and that’s why they’re so good, writes Scotty Stevenson.
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It only took two rounds but any lingering doubts about the Crusaders’ ability to perform without two of the best All Blacks of of all time evaporated with a gritty win over the Blues on Friday night. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t clinical, but it was illustrative of a hidden depth in the squad that had been hard to see beneath the bright lights of the club’s biggest names.
It was illustrative, too, of the power of the game plan. The Crusaders may have made subtle shifts over time, but at the heart of everything they do is an adherence to press defence rugby that feeds on opponents’ mistakes. The Blues gladly dished up a smorgasbord of those, and the Crusaders filled their boots.
No Carter, no McCaw, no Matt Todd, no Tom Taylor, no Colin Slade, no Ryan Crotty – no worries. That was about the gist of it against a Blues side that was pinned inside its 22 metres for what seemed like the entire game. The Crusaders spent almost quarter of an hour sniffing around the Blues try line, and only some staunch defence and a willingness to concede penalties on the Blues’ part prevented the score from blowing out.
This game showed why the Crusaders can never be discounted as a playoff hopeful. They are robots. This is a team that slots players into a game plan, rather than builds a game plan around players. They spread the ball, probe the width, kick for turf, make their tackles and repeat.
That kind of footy requires organisation and drive, and in Andy Ellis they have a metronomic competitor who mitigates any loss of speed over time with a Rembrandts approach to scrum half play. His motto: I’ll be there for you. He is the Chandler Bing of rugby.
On Friday night he was clobbered by a forearm and left the field for a concussion test. Midway through the examination, the Doctor asked him if he was feeling a little slow. His reply? “Only because I am getting old.” He sailed through the Head Injury Assessment (HIA) Protocol and sprinted back down the long player tunnel to retake his place in the game. It was typical Andy Ellis; he’s like the Black Knight in the famous Monty Python sketch: “Tis but a scratch.”
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Ellis is the veteran in a backline that once was populated by All Blacks and is now comprised of age grade stars and a giant Fijian winger. The backline is there, mainly, to supply a series of hands for the ball to go through before it is invariably passed to Nemani Nadolo. The Crusaders made a tournament high 206 passes on Friday night. Ellis threw 64 of them. Most of them went to Nadolo.
There are plenty of critics when it comes to the Crusaders game plan. It doesn’t rely on exciting counter-attack like the Chiefs and the Highlanders. It is not filled to the brim with revolutionary midfield moves, and it is nothing if not predictable. But when it is done well, it works. And on Friday night it was done very well indeed.
Even better for the Crusaders, they head into the bye having restored their pride on their home patch with a 13th straight defeat of the Blues in Christchurch and get this: they have the best post-bye record of any New Zealand team, winning 78% of their games after a break.
You may not be entertained by the Crusaders, but you have been warned.
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