James Lowe part of high-stakes game in battle for the skies

Johnny Sexton has picked the brains of AFL and NRL coaches about their approach to aerial battles while former Dublin footballer Brian Fenton was in Ireland camp last spring.

The outlawing of escort runners has changed the aerial game in rugby, making those battles "incredibly tougher" according to James Lowe. Pic: ©INPHO/Gary Carr

James Lowe wasn’t long in the door and after putting the kids down for a nap when Troy Parrott went and mainlined a shot of delirium into the veins of an entire country in Budapest last Sunday afternoon.

Lowe is a Manchester City fan, he likes his football, but a part of his rugby brain must have been impressed by the prodigious heights that Liam Scales reached before heading the ball on for the AZ Alkmaar striker to scrape home that winner with his studs.

Rugby is a game of varying means. The theory is that teams have to ‘earn’ the right to go around opponents by going through them first: to use a north-south route so that it opens up the means to strike on the so-called east-west axis.

The other means of getting ahead is to take to the skies.

That’s always been the case, but the tweaks in regulations that have outlawed the use of so-called escort runners to block the path from kicker on one side to prospective receiver on the other have been game-changing.

Catching the dropping ball now is a pure, mano-a-mano contest.

A simple enough change to just one aspect of the game, the ripple effects from it have spread into the farthest corners of the game. The extent of that was made clear to Andy Farrell’s players in a meeting only last Tuesday.

All it took was one photo from their meeting with South Africa in Durban two summers ago. Lowe didn’t expand on the details but it clearly showed just how lanes once packed like city streets have now been cleared to resemble quiet country lanes.

“The thing we used to call the cradle, which was pretty much just protecting the catcher so that he could get a clean catch? There were about six lads protecting a dude trying to go up and win a high ball!

“Now, obviously that's changed and it’s brought a bit of a different dynamic to the game. And it's incredibly tougher now. Obviously, every contestable kick, there's a collision in the air that you've got to worry about.

“There's trying to not knock it on, trying to win it clean. I think we only won one high ball clean [against Australia last week] and it was the first one, so that was Mackie [Hansen]. And then the other two where they could have been clean, me and Mack dropped it cold.” 

The change has led to more of a focus on the high ball game in training. More live contests. Johnny Sexton picked the brains of AFL and NRL coaches when in Australia this summer with the British and Irish Lions. Dublin’s Brian Fenton was in Ireland camp last spring.

“I mean, he's massive,” Lowe said of Fenton. ”He's such a big dude, lean as lettuce, 6’5” or 6’6”. He was running around with a shoulder hanging off him and he's like, even just technically how cool, calm and collected he was.

“I know it's a different ball that they have to worry about, and it’s still moving in the air, and I'm not taking away any anything away from that, but they've been doing it since they were five, six, seven years old. We've gotten a little bit better, but there's still a long way to go.” 

A catch is a simple thing, but the mechanics are worth taking apart. The timing of a jump is critical. The aim may be to get your arms higher than the other bloke’s but to do that you need to get your knees higher first.

The ground game is just as important. Tapping the ball backwards makes spatial awareness and workrate key for supporting runners who need to keep their thumbs together and fingers pointed down when hoovering up the scraps.

The AFL are big on that sort of stuff.

“A lot of it is timing. And now, with the collision in the air, we're actually going up more hand over head trying to catch it, like the AFL boys do. The NRL boys are very, very good at it as well. And a lot of it is timing. You don't want to be a sitting duck.

“You don't want to be standing under it knowing you've got a Canan Moodie or a Cheslin Kolbe or someone leaping on top of you. So, being able to get the timing of going back to then generate momentum and go forward. But a lot of it's the collision in the air.” 

The Boks are superb in the air. England have tailored their player selection to favour players who can dominate that particular battle and the theory that Ireland should excel in this department given the GAA tradition here is, to be blunt about it, lazy and dangerous.

There isn’t a whole heap of hurling or football hours in the current Ireland squad. This is an area of the modern game that relies on plenty of practise far more than stereotypes. And, as Lowe predicts, it looks like these laws are here to stay.