Nienaber: 'It will take 14 weeks to bed in Leinster's new defence'

The South African is aiming to radically overhaul how the eastern province set up.

Tue, 09 Jan, 2024 - 07:10

Brendan O'Brien

Jacques Nienaber is finding his feet in Dublin and with Leinster. The GPS has been shelved, Dun Laoghaire, Blackrock, the Dundrum Shopping Centre and three southside pubs have all been committed to memory, and the No.11 bus takes him into the city centre when he fancies a coffee.

The lingo is coming along, too.

Communicating with Leinster players and South African players isn’t quite a copy-and-paste job, but swear words belong to a universal language so the South African has been particularly taken by the Irish propensity to drop f-bombs as a signal of amazement.

“Swearing? I think I shocked our group,” he explained ahead of the province’s Heineken Champions Cup pool tie with Stade Francais at the Aviva Stadium on Saturday. “Everybody has got their things they do wrong and swearing is mine. I do swear a lot.”

The real question, of course, is how the two parties understand each other when it comes to the defence. This is the department that has been entrusted to Nienaber since his post-World Cup arrival at the end of November and it will be crucial to their season.

There was very little wrong with Leinster’s ‘D’ before he pitched up.

The man himself stresses that point, but the surgery in train is radical all the same and the job at hand involves a sea change from a drift defence (despite Garry Ringrose’s long-held penchant to shoot out of the line) to a blitz package that secured the Webb Ellis twice over.

The discussion was had when he started at UCD: stick or twist to something new. Nienaber found a dressing-room and a staff keen to rip that side of the ledger up and start again, but he has gone about his work without the luxury of a manual and a leisurely pre-season roll-out.

“Everything is different,” he explained when asked for details on ‘The New Way’.

“Switching to a defence with this sort of line speed is “the polar opposite” to what they knew. Players will need to “rewire their brains” and put in the work before the main wrinkles are ironed out.

A big body of work, then, but a familiar one.

“It will be 14 weeks. It took 14 weeks with Munster, it took 14 games with the Boks when we took over in 2018. In 2018 we won 50 percent of our Test matches and the majority we lost because of our defence but in 2019 we only lost one.

“So it takes time and that's… Unfortunately, the players will have to pay their school fees and will have to learn, and especially in this environment. The easiest way to get results, and the way to get them quite quickly, is to just go for performance.”

Ideally, that would involve playing as settled a team and matchday squad as possible week after week but rugby doesn’t work like that. Not with the weekly toll of injuries and with the bulk of the Leinster panel needed for Six Nations duties in the near future.

Still, if his 14-game plan goes to schedule, and if Leinster make it through the round of 16 and quarter-final stages in the Champions Cup, then the players should have the system fully downloaded by the time the season approaches its peak.

Ulster on New Year’s Day was the perfect example of a work in process with Billy Burns using the boot to counter that rush defence: his kicking tore up the budding system for three tries and helped secure a win at the RDS for Dan McFarland’s visitors.

Nienaber isn’t losing sleep over it. He has seen the likes of Richie Mo’unga, Beauden Barret and Finn Russell target his teams similarly and knows that the exceptional rotation in personnel required over the Christmas would leave them vulnerable at this stage.

He has been here before and knows what the graph will look like: errors, improvement, over-confidence and then the end point. And the proof will be in the pudding. Not in tackle completions, but in the raw currency of points and tries conceded.

That’s all that counts.

“If you go, 'Yes, our defence was good guys, we got 100% tackle completion, we didn't miss one tackle' but we were so narrow that it was literally a seven-on-two overlap and they just pass, pass, pass… You don't miss a tackle but they score four tries like that.

“In the three tries we conceded against Ulster, the second one there was no missed tackle, they just ran in. Is that good or bad? They scored, that's bad. It's not good. So points conceded is the main thing.”

Leo Cullen’s side finds itself in very decent shape after the opening two rounds of the Champions Cup. Already on nine points, they can push their case for home knockout advantage further against the Parisians at the weekend.

Tadhg Furlong, who has missed recent games after the passing of his father, and James Lowe, who hasn’t played since the World Cup with a foot injury, have both trained and a decision on their availability is still to be made.

James Ryan, withdrawn as a precaution before the Ulster game, is another in the waiting room but Jimmy O’Brien has been ruled out for a number of months with a neck issue and there is no word yet on return dates for Ross Byrne, Charlie Ngatai and Jamie Osborne.