Over the pre-season I’m going to be posting some of my thoughts about playing rugby on the website. I’m doing this as a way to open up the process, to bring new players up to speed and hopefully, to get the more experienced of us thinking differently about our game.

Rugby union is a wondrous sport, but essentially, it is a very simple sport:

• The ball is carried forward by the team in possession. Defenders try to stop them.
• If you are on the ground or in front of the ball (offside) you can’t legally participate and need to get yourself into a position from which you can.
• When you get the ball, run forwards or pass backwards. When in doubt: commit. Indecision is the biggest mistake you will ever make in rugby.
• The way to make ground is to attack where the opposition defence is poor: where they have the fewest or the weakest defenders.
• A try is scored by crossing the try-line and grounding the ball. Additional points can be scored by kicking the ball over the posts.

That’s it. People can make rugby very complicated – I will make rugby complicated. It’s not. Never forget that.

Here’s the thing: there is only so much any coach will ever be able to teach you. To have flawless technique and an intimate knowledge of the moves is only a tiny fraction of playing rugby.

The Japanese have historically been the perfect example of this. More people play rugby in Japan than in any other country and yet they are ranked only 15th in the world. While they are well drilled and have access to some of the strongest coaches in the world, they have traditionally had none of the flexibility and creativity of a team like the All Blacks.

Flexibility and creativity.

This is something no coach can teach you, and it is the part of your game that will make all of the difference in playing well and in teaching yourself how to play better.

The rest of this post is going to be devoted to a meta-theory of rugby, an epistemology if you like, from which you can hopefully develop your ability to teach yourself how to play better. I can’t get this to work for you, but that I hope that through recognising it, you can encourage it yourself.

I’ve played rugby for ten years. I’ve attended a lot of training sessions and have been lucky to have had some pretty fantastic coaches. And yet when I step out on the field, not a singe thing they have said goes through my head. In fact, nothing in particular is going through my head. I’m not thinking about technique, I’m not thinking about school or about my job or about that thing I shouldn’t have done but haven’t yet. All of my worries drop away from my mind and I am focused only on what is in front of me. I’m in the zone. It’s meditative.

Perhaps I need an example to draw out what’s going on…

As a back rower I often find myself at the back of a maul deciding upon the proper moment to engage. I’m not thinking about body position, about staying low, about driving through the opposition. These things are all important, but they are not at the forefront of my mind. Instead I have a model in my head of what a maul looks like. I expect that it is soon going to turn towards me, that an opponents ribs or back is going to open up, and that I will have the best opportunity to strike. When this happens, I carry out the action with total commitment. If it doesn’t happen, I reappraise my model and try something different: I might engage anyway to help with the push, or, I might refocus my attention upon defence.

This is a knack for the moment. This is why I’m often able to gauge when a ball is going to be turned over before it is, sometimes before the tackle is made. This is why I’m often able to guess when the opposition is going to change the direction of their attack. These are things that are important to playing in the back row. I’m not able to tell when a full-back is going to run or kick the ball, and I’m not able to tell when my front rowers are going to hold, drive or wield in the scrum. Thankfully, they seem to know. I suspect all players have this knack for the moment, and that it all works, to lesser or greater amounts, in the same way as it does for me.

If we try to focus on everything we will see nothing. If we aren’t looking for something in particular, we will have no chance of seeing it at all.

So, at the risk of instrumentalising this knack for a situation, I want to draw out some principles.

1. Players have a model in their head of what something looks like. This model has been built up through experience; through watching and playing rugby.
2. They have an expectation about what is going to happen. They are literally waiting for the right moment.
3. They have an action that they intend to carry out when that moment arrises.
4. If the moment doesn’t arise they have a backup action, something they’re not likely to be as committed to achieving. This might be safe option, or if they’re mentally fatigued, it could be something risky or illegal.
5. They feed their experiences of what just happened back into their model, effecting future expectations, and best courses of action.

While confidence and commitment are crucial to the first three steps, I think the fifth step is the most important one here. It seems to be what is governing how quickly a player is developing their creativity and flexibility – it is essentially what I’m interested in for this post.

I think the fifth step rests on principles of experimentation and self-analysis. Don’t hold your ideas or methods about rugby too highly (at least not to yourself) and don’t be afraid to ask yourself questions about why what you were waiting for didn’t happen, or why what you were trying to achieve didn’t have its desired effect. The ability to develop is essentially the ability to feed all of this back into your model of the game: to learn from your mistakes.

I really hope some of you can relate to this. I don’t think model is connected to how little or how much you know but to how you learn. Have a proper think about what you’re doing when you play. If rugby doesn’t convince you that this is correct, think about something that you are good at, something you do best when you really get into that zone.