Re-reading my deleted posts this one seems more than usually pertinent.

Excerpt from an article by Bret Harris in The Australian, July 30, 2007, including quotes from John Muggleton, the Wallabies’ defence coach.

It’s not often that we receive such a cogent and thought-provoking example of current rugby thinking. Perhaps with the World Cup looming we shouldn’t take Muggleton’s back-off’ tactic too seriously, though. The emphasis is mine, however.

…
“Defence has changed completely because the game has changed completely,” Muggleton said. ‘It is more about unstructured play now. Most tries are scored from unstructured play - turnovers, kick-returns. It has actually become a game where people really take the risk in attack, when they know the defence is not set.
…
“The emphasis now is how to go from attack to defence and doing that quickly. If you do lose the ball, what do you do, if they have the numbers?”
…
“You’ve got to get them to waste space,” Muggleton said. “You’ve got to make them pass the ball. You’ve got to make them play away from the scoring zone, while you get organised. So what we do is actually back off and hope they’ll pass the ball towards the sideline, use up passes and use up men so we end up with even numbers and we’ll close it down.

“In the past, we’ve tried to run up and shut it down straight away and that’s where you are disjointed in defence and they can find holes, draw a man and pass. They use up very few numbers, but they have an overlap so they score in the corner.

“Now we back off and let them play. We try and let them use up their advantage, shut them down eventually and try on the next phase to regain control.”