World Rugby recently featured what they termed ‘The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall’ on their social media platforms.
It could just have easily been called ‘The World Cup’s Greatest Hits’ and involves smaller players, mostly backline, tackling bigger men and stopping them dead in their tracks during World Cups over the years.
The first in the chain of sequences involves James Lowe in Ireland’s Pool B game against South Africa in Stade de France last year. It shows Josh van der Flier and Lowe moving forward to tackle the Springbok lock Eben Etzebeth, who tries to muscle his way towards the Irish line.
It is Lowe who gets in under Etzebeth and drives him upwards off his feet and back. Other Irish shirts swarm in and the referee points for a penalty to Ireland. It should have been a mismatch, but it is the Irish winger who becomes giant slayer.
Later in the sequence Ireland are playing against Romania again in a 2023 World Cup Pool B match. This time the 6ft6in Irish lock Joe McCarthy is pounding up the left touchline with momentum and mass in his favour and zeroed in on the try line at the corner. Fullback Marius Simonescu then appears from the side and hits McCarthy. Slow motion shows Simonescu bouncing off the bigger man’s body but the hit is enough to send the giant secondrow off his projected course and into touch.
It was a reminder of what Exeter Chiefs director of rugby, Rob Baxter, told Rob Kitson in the Guardian earlier this week, which went along the lines that seemingly predictable outcomes in rugby don’t always pan out the way people think they will.
“Doubling up on games you’ve had a good result in is the hardest thing to do in rugby,” he explained. “The amount of times I’ve been involved, either playing or coaching, when you’ve won by 30 points one week and the next time it’s so different.”
Leinster, with McCarthy and Lowe, face that predicament when Leicester Tigers travel over from the England midlands to the Aviva Stadium this weekend.
There is nothing in the recent history of the Premiership side’s meetings with Leinster that would make them anything other than underdogs. A predictable outcome?
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Leinster have won the last three games between the sides going back to May 2022 in the Champions Cup and have averaged 35 points to Leicester’s 16.
Leinster have won their last five matches, Leicester have lost three of their last five. And yet. Lowe dominating a much bigger opponent in Etzebeth and Baxter’s misgivings about beating a team that you have already beaten carry an inherent warning.
Some years ago Gordon D’Arcy, in his column in this paper, shed some light on what Baxter might have been talking about.
Rugby is like that. The mood of the players and the team is as important as their physical ability and the tactics they have been given by the coaching staff. Players don’t need others to put thoughts into their heads. They can do that themselves and they have to train hard not to.
Baxter didn’t offer any reasons for his straying into the psychology of the underdog and what makes backing up a win against a team you have already beaten so difficult.
Had he looked into it more deeply, a 2019 article in Psychology Today could have told him that, in the last 200 years, weak actors prevail about 30 per cent of the time in international conflicts. The flipside is they lose 70 per cent of the time.
One of the theories of the underdog is that teams or individuals with power feel a sense of entitlement. With that comes the sense that they have more to lose. That can be construed as an area of weakness.
The thinking goes on to explain that underdogs in a conflict sometimes win, not because they are smarter than their adversary, but because “they understand their adversary better than their [stronger] adversary understands them.”
That’s not to say Leicester Tigers understand Leinster better because Leinster beat them 27-10 in Welford Road at the beginning of the year, or that Leinster players feel a sense of entitlement. It’s that Leicester Tigers know they cannot be the same, they must change.
A return match in the Aviva in front of over 30,000 largely partisan supporters could appear to be almost overwhelming. That means Leicester must turn up as more creative, tenacious and adaptable. They arrive as the underdogs and they must play like the underdogs, which demands from them to apply the correct measures of cunning and commitment or face possible annihilation.
Malcolm Gladwell addressed the issue in his book, David and Goliath – Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, and noted that all of the subjects he interviewed understood that adversity made them stronger. The psychology of inequality or what they fancifully call “competitive asymmetry” will play out in Dublin this weekend.
Both Lowe and McCarthy, in their brief World Cup clips, know at a personal level how that sometimes works in rugby.
