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.
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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.”
