Missed Tackles: A World Rugby Epidemic

Soaring missed tackle counts are a blight on the face of modern rugby, writes Lee Calvert.

Rugby, like most modern professional sports, is more coached than at any time in its history. The logical conclusion to this is that the sport, or specifically the skills within it, should be better than they have ever been, or certainly so good that your attention isn’t drawn to any particular weakness. After all, you wouldn’t expect a dog with a full time toilet trainer to shit all over your couch, would you?

But, there is a nagging problem with one particular skill at the professional level: tackling. More specifically: missed tackles. It is amazing that this is not being analysed or criticised more by the media, fans and pundits.

Bad tackling is the elephant in the room when it comes to elite level rugby. Commentators and observers are keen to wax about how good modern conditioning is and come over all Ugo Monye Commentary Sex Noise about big hits, but they are far more circumspect when it comes to admitting that the number of missed tackles in games is too often unacceptable.

Dane Haylett-Petty’s missed tackle on Ryan Crotty in the lead up to his try in Round 1 of the Rugby Championship was, to put it politely, appalling. And yet the commentators made excuses rather than calling it for what it was: unacceptable. This could be forgiven perhaps if it was a one-off, but the stats don’t really support the view that this was an anomaly.

In the opening round of fixtures the Southern Hemisphere’s premier tournament saw 100 missed tackles. ONE-HUNDRED! Or to put in another way, fifty tackles in each match. Ah, but surely this was opening round rustiness and it is unfair to single this out as an example of the state of tackling at the top level of the game.

Well, maybe, but not really. Round 2 saw 71 tackles missed while Round 3 saw the participants bouncing off 68. Granted, the curve on the graph is going in the right direction, but the fact remains that across the six fixtures 229 tackles have been missed at an average of 38 tackles per test.

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Looking into the stats a bit more, New Zealand can perhaps be sheltered from the opprobrium as they have stiffed only 36 in total with most missed in any one match being 13. The Wallabies on the other hand, reflecting their current malaise, have missed ballsed-up 71, including missing 30 in the Round 1 horror show against the All Blacks.

As a Northern Hemisphere writer, my natural inclination was to conclude that such poor tackle stats are to be expected down south, what with all the basketball scores and sexy hands. Surely rugby up north would be better? Not so much.

Last Saturday’s four Aviva Premiership fixtures saw 140 tackles involving the defender falling off, at an average of 35 tackles per match. The Guinness Pro12 was in a similar situation, with on average 34 missed tackles per match. In fact, of all the professional teams that ran out over the weekend in the Six Nations countries only two of them managed a missed tackle figure that was in single digits (Ulster and Scarlets, in case you’re wondering).

Despite at least one coach whose focus is specifically on defence in every set up and full time players in better condition than ever, even the best teams miss upwards of 15 tackles, or one per man, in every fixture. Surely as a sport rugby can do better than this, and moreover we should be demanding so. It starts by acknowledging that missed tackles are not isolated incidents, they are endemic across every team in every fixture, in every competition.