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Dean Ryan: Intellect at 8, 9 and 10

Dean Ryan explains how the intellectual players at 8, 9 and 10 can help the cohesiveness of a rugby team.

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For me the intellect sits with eight nine and ten. So not not the intellect of an individual game, but the cohesiveness of a team. There's an awful lot of movement patterns now about how the side moves around the field and for me that that intellect of why and when and where we're doing things is all captured in those three people. You've obviously got the number eight and he will Define that whether you're going forward or not. You've got the nine which is that, you know, sort of access between the forwards and the 10 and you've got 10 control in the outside backs if they're on the same sheet and they have that level of intellect. It's a nice balance. It's like a rhythm to the game and I think that's as important now even though so much of the game is organized is still you can create as many things on a whiteboard off the field but still those guys responsibility to glue them together and I think in the real quality players, it's also their responsibility to step out and do something different. It's not you know is organization gives you the people say we love to play on structure rugby to play on structure. Rugby. You've got to have structure to know when it's unstructured and it's the 8 9 and 10 s responsibility to find that and if you get those people with real grasp of that you again got a nice Rhythm to it because total on structures chaos and stroke total over structures pretty boring and these people are moving it in and a sliding scale all the time and if they get it, right that's what dictates the real quality of them. So, you know, you look at a will get near you know, they're the sort of world top players and you just think you know think of intellect rugby intellect and that captures, you know, how much is a real guy that can run all those aspects at the same time.