Scott Lawrence Speaks with GRR About Changes to Come
Scott Lawrence Speaks with GRR About Changes to Come
It’s almost as if there are two test match seasons in 2024.
The upcoming Pacific Nations Cup will look, potentially, quite different from July’s two matches with Romania and Scotland, and in the end that’s to be expected.
USA Men’s 15s Head Coach Scott Lawrence, who sat down with GRR to talk about this, is making changes, but added that changes, both in approach and in personnel, were something he intended to make anyway.
The losses to Romania and Scotland just spelled out what he knew were issues already.
USA vs Canada Saturday, August 31, Dignity Health Sports Park, Carson, Calif. Tickets On Sale Here>>
Familiarity Breeds ... Everything Else
Key among those, and key within the USA setup for years now, is time together.
Romania looked like what they are, a hard-nosed, hard-minded rugby team that had been together for a large chunk of the spring playing in the European Rugby Championship.
The USA looked like a team that had been apart for six months and had been together for four days.
“Some of the issues are probably easier to see when you lose a couple of games,” Lawrence told GRR. “The team was almost brand new. We had a new 9-10 combination, and when that happened often you get what we saw, which was a team that really struggled to get continuity. We as a coaching staff knew that was a risk.”
Even so the Eagles were in a position to win that game, a couple of missed kicks away. Those kicks, however, are just “background,” said Lawrence. They would have masked what needs to be worked on.
“We need to have everyone seeing the same picture at the same time,” said Lawrence. “And it sounds strange to say when you lose 42-7, but we were better with that against Scotland; the difference was significant. But against Scotland our problem was penalties, and when you have 20 penalties called against you it makes it difficult to establish continuity. When we did have possession we did well.”
Lawrence is soft-pedaling a game in which the flow of penalties was one way at crucial times, and in which Scotland got the benefit of the doubt far too many times.
So that’s big picture stuff, really. Time together is what the program needs and the Pacific Nations Cup gives the USA five weeks of time together. They will have two weeks before playing Canada on August 31 in LA.
That’s a lot better than basically four days for Romania.
Because what the Eagles need is more time—time to piece the attack pattern together on the field not just in email presentations and Zoom calls; time to understand how each player operates so that no one is isolated in the tackle; time to scrum and maul.
“July was about getting back together and get what cohesiveness we can; we did well in November but you can’t recapture that magic, you have to go forward.”
New Faces, New Combinations
The Eagles are in flux in terms of personnel. Some players are coming to the end of their international career, and it’s tough there because many of those experienced players give a coach what he needs in terms of an understanding of what’s required.
Yet the coach also has to look to the future. There’s a World Cup to qualify for, with qualifiers in 2025 and RWC Australia in 2027.
There are players who likely will not be in that 2027 World Cup (if the USA qualifies) but who might be needed now to help bring the next generation forward.
There are also new faces coming out of Major League Rugby and the collegiate game who are knocking on the door. We'll also see some players we've seen before, but recalled and maybe reimagined. Watch for a new-look tight five and a backline that will need those extra preparation days.
We will see several of those new faces in the PNC. Not all of them. Some, Lawrence said, are perhaps a year away and just need more seasoning. Some are getting that seasoning in competitions outside the USA and are being allowed to do that.
Some have a degree to finish up.
But we will see a bunch of new caps and players with a small number of caps in this team. The Eagles for the PNC should be markedly younger.
“As an American rugby coach you’re always developing, and we will be ringing changes now,” Lawrence said. “But when these players come in they will look like a fish out of water. They have to experience it. They need to see the speed. They need to see the intensity. Then we see how they respond.”
Some will be thrown into the fire pretty quickly.
USA vs Canada Saturday, August 31, Dignity Health Sports Park, Carson, Calif. Tickets On Sale Here>>
Make it Fun, Make it Inspirational
There was a bunch of talk after the USA beat Stade Toulouse a year ago that the USA wanted to play rugby that inspired.
Wild and Exciting Encounter Sees USA Over Toulouse
It’s fair to say that the Eagles’ way of playing in the last two matches was … relatively basic … and not super exciting.
To this most professional coaches will say “I’m here to win,” and Lawrence is no different.
“You’ve got to win test matches,” he said. “And test match rugby is chess in many ways. You want to build pressure and that can be unstructured pressure—that unstructured style we’re talking about. But we have some terminology in our approach about when we want to use that. It’s inherent in our game, but we need to be sure everybody on the team knows when and where we’re trying to do it.”
Sometimes, Lawrence added, you just hold onto to dang ball, make sure your clearouts are snappy, and work your way down the field or force a penalty.
Lawrence said it in one phrase: “Brave the the obvious.”
And that’s true of any team; they open up the throttle when it’s on. When the defense is giving you less, you change your approach.
All of That is to Say
“It’s going to be bumpy,” said Lawrence. And the thing is, now is the time for it to be bumpy.
Japan is putting together a fairly young side for the 2024 PNC for the same reason Lawrence is blooding some players—you’ve got to do it sometime and the year after the World Cup is probably the time.
But hopes for the USA team to be more USA-developed and younger will likely be answered. That team also probably needs a somewhat forgiving fan base.
