One of the key tasks entrusted to my late, great friend Alun Carter when he was chief analyst for Wales [1998-2006] was the processing of information for the use of the coaches while the game was very much ‘live’. Alun always had a very lucid memory of Steve Hansen’s first game as an international head coach, when he took over from Graham Henry for the Six Nations encounter versus France on March 2, 2002.
I’ll let Alun take up the story behind the build-up:
“Anxious to make an impression, Steve probably tried to do too much, too soon. One of the immediate changes was that the backroom staff now had to get to the ground ahead of time to test all the equipment.
“When I arrived before the France match, there was already a comms expert there, fiddling with the wiring in the coaching booth. Whether in error or by design – I wasn’t sure which – he enabled us to tap into the both the comms feeds, which meant that we would potentially have access to advance information of France’s intentions during the game.
“It takes time and a lot of trust between all members of the management team to get clear, concise messages on to the field 100per cent of the time. It can go spectacularly wrong. Recently I noticed that [then] Ireland head coach Eddie O’Sullivan only entrusted messages to his long-standing analyst Mervyn Murphy, who functioned as the water-boy running them out on to the field.
“Yet here we were, trying to decode French intentions before we had streamlined our own lines of communication. It was slightly bizarre, especially as they were French after all, and we didn’t have a single French speaker in our box! But the same mistake was repeated in the game against Italy which followed the fixture against Les Bleus.”
That stuttering start to Sir Steve Hansen’s glittering international coaching career was all about information overload. The game of Rugby is increasingly, full of information. There is optical tracking and there are camera-shots from every angle on the field; tagging software which allow analysts in to highlight events and clip videos together; statistical data-feeds which supply metrics on possession/territory splits, tackle completion rates, and expected outcomes in real time; wearable GPS and biometric vests tracking real-time physical outputs, like running distances, sprint counts, and fatigue warnings.
It is not always easy to sort the wheat from the chaff during a real game. The art of extracting valuable nuggets from a sea of data and transmitting it clearly to players on the field is becoming one of the new ‘dark arts’ in the armoury of a successful head coach, and the effectiveness of communication from coaching booth to pitch can be judged by the changes it engineers on the field.
For example, the sense of the game a coach has up in the booth is often based on the ‘eagle’s eye’, a forensic, wide-angle view. It does not always suit the emotional tenor of what’s happening out on the pitch. Coaches need to know what matters in the moment for their players..
Ex-Leinster and England coach Stuart Lancaster’s experience in the Top 14 with Racing 92 taught him that it was not only useful to have one coach ‘in the box’, it was essential another pitch-side, picking up on emotional trends in the game. The coach in the side-line was often a far more accurate gauge of player and crowd emotion in the moment at the intensely partisan, claustrophobically-loud stadia in the South-West of France.
Some excellent samples of clear communication between teams on and off the pitch, and high-quality in-game decision-making occurred in the first match of the two-game series between Argentina and Australia, played out in the mountain town of San Salvador de Jujuy.
In the first half, the Pumas announced their intention to blitz the Wallaby half-back and first receiver off the back of red zone lineouts:
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) September 23, 2026
The Pumas want to use the last forward in the four-man line to rush straight on to the Aussie number 9 Ryan Lonergan, while the first man in the back-line blitzes first receiver. The Wallabies nearly paid the ultimate price, conceding a cheap five- or seven-pointer on their own goal-line.
Early in the second period, the same scenario was duplicated, down to the last ‘i’ dotted and the final ‘t’ crossed:
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) September 23, 2026
In this instance, the same Wallaby lineout receiver [Josh Canham, in the head-band], dummies the ball straight off the top of the throw, and that is enough to throw the timing of the blitz off, and catch the same two aggressors offside. It is a small but significant item on the coaching menu but potentially, it saved the Wallabies seven points which could have cost them the game.
Late on in the first period, with Australia dropping down to 14 men on a yellow card to left wing Harry Potter, the Argentine play-makers off and on the field of play were able to reassess the organization of the Wallaby backfield from two consecutive lineouts:
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) September 23, 2026
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) September 23, 2026
In the first example, the Wallabies compensate for the absence of Potter by plugging their blind-side wing [Max Jorgensen] into the defensive 10 channel at a right-side lineout, instead of ‘Jorgo’ doing duty in the backfield pendulum behind the first line of defence. With Jorgensen still up at the second lineout on the same side of the field, the Pumas take the opportunity to chip into the space the New South Welshman would have occupied with the Wallabies back to full strength. They are one eccentric bounce of an oval-shaped ball short of scoring a try..
Summary
Sir Steve Hansen made precious few mistakes in his international career as a head coach. But right at the start of that career, his chief analyst understood that the deluge of information available could be either curse or blessing. Managing that flow of information and the reactions to it in real time, and using trusted messengers to get clear messages out on to the field are key factors in the success of the top coaches in the professional game, everywhere on planet rugby. .
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