Today’s skill is the tackle. We’re going to be focusing on winning the contact with your plant foot and driving through jerry’s going to be attacking i’ll be defending.
For the start of the drill we’re just going to walk through it really slowly so we can explain everything but once you get it at your club you can you can jog through to start with and then go go at 100 or 80 percent.
So Jerry’s going to be running to score on that cone and i’m gonna be defending coming across with a classic cover tackle
So just walking through Jerry so coming through nice and low going into contact and your plant foot you want you want it right down the middle so basically down the middle of Jerry same leg same shoulder and this stops Jerry’s drive
Coming through this way now I’ve dominated the contact first point of contact and i can drive through with my back leg and take Jerry backwards
We’re going to go a bit faster this one just jogging through and we’ll also talk through some safety points after
At this point you want to be as Jerry’s coming here you want to start dipping low here at the hips and then it’s short steps coming in right before contact one big step down the middle shoulder and you want your head you always want your head somewhere soft
So general rule is cheek to cheek you never want your head here it puts your neck neck in danger of twisting or Jerry’s knee driving up and hitting you in the head So same foot same shoulder short steps dipping coming in and one long step into contact
That plant foot right down the center of Jerry so it stops his momentum coming forward and gives me the advantage in the contact and i can then drive through with the back foot
One of the main focuses in this in this drill is your plant foot so with Jerry running across that way I’m coming from the side i want to hit him with my right shoulder so my plant foot is going to be my right foot I really want to get this right foot in as close as possible to Jerry because all my my shoulder is going to be the first point of contact but all the power is going to come through my legs
So the closer it is to him the more power i’m going to be able to push through through Jerry and drive him back If i’m if my plant foot’s here i’m sort of chasing chasing my body and losing all this power so the the tackle’s not going to be as effective and Jerry will probably win that contact and take me backwards
So that’s a thing to remember for this drill In a game in real game situation it’s not always going to be as simple as this and getting the perfect tackle but it’s good to practice the perfect technique and it’ll help you a lot especially winning contact in the games
There was a skill for today i hope you learned something new that you can share with your friends and your rugby club and hope it improves your game
Thanks to jerry from the lakeba rugby club for his time today and i wish him all the best in his game this weekend.
Randall Kamea
