My WHOOP, Me, And The First Day Of The New NLR Rugby Season
©Photos from Mark Ashcroft Collection with video clips on TalkingRugbyUnion Facebook
Checking my own homework at Park Lane
Before a ball was kicked this season, I wrote a preview setting out exactly what I’d be watching for once National League Rugby returned; first-phase decision making, what happens on phases four, five and six, the five seconds after a turnover, which 9 and 10 actually manage a game rather than just play it. I said I’d chosen my match and wasn’t telling anyone where. It was Park Lane, Sedgley Park Tigers against Darlington Mowden Park, season opener, and it turns out I set myself rather a lot of homework to mark on the touchline while also wearing a WHOOP.
The scoreline, for the record, was 47-26. But the shape of it tells you more than the final number. Alessandro Minozzi scored a hat-trick inside the first 21 minutes; tries in the 6th, 14th and 21st which is about as emphatic an answer to “what will a team do with clean first-phase possession” as you could hope to script. Then the game settled into something closer to the pattern I’d written about: Birwell crossing on 40, Mallinson on 45, Pope on 58, and Davies finishing it off in the 80th minute, right on the whistle, with Shone landing six of the seven conversions. Early explosion, a mid-match lull, then a finish. If you wanted a single match to test the theory that NLR sides play with more ambition in hand than their professional counterparts, three tries inside twenty-one minutes on the opening day is a decent place to start.
I should say at this point that I do not wear my WHOOP to play rugby. I wear it to stand near rugby, drink from a flask, and shout the occasional piece of advice that no player has ever once heard or acted upon. And yet, somehow, standing at Park Lane for eighty minutes produces a strain score that would suggest I’d been in the front row myself. There was illdiscipline in this one too, the kind that has both benches doing that particular pantomime of pointing at the referee and each other in roughly equal measure, and my WHOOP has no way of separating “watched a yellow card” from “ran a fitness test.” It just knows that at various points yesterday afternoon, I stood up very suddenly, several times, for reasons it has no way of understanding.
Then there were the box kicks, and this is where my own preview came back to bite me a little. I’d written about watching which scrum-half puts a box kick into the air and what happens next and what happened next, on at least one occasion, was Darlington scoring from it. One poor Sedgley box kick went straight into a DMP try, the exact five-secondsafter-chaos scenario I’d said I wanted to watch for, except this time the chaos favoured the away side. The rest of the afternoon’s box kicks, by contrast, achieved almost nothing for whoever put boot to ball; hung up, chased, and generally resulting in the sort of contested nothing that makes you wonder why anyone bothers, right up until the one time it goes badly wrong. National League 2 North box kicks are a genre unto themselves, hung into a grey Whitefield sky just long enough for absolutely everybody, both sets of chasers and the entire crowd, to have a proper look at it and reconsider their afternoon. Every single one registered on my wrist as a small, private spike of tension that had nothing to do with fitness and everything to do with hoping the bounce goes our way, and on that one occasion, it very much didn’t.
On the more encouraging side of the ledger, Sedgley’s fly-half looked to have real skills on the ball, and the early signs are that he and scrum-half Tansey could combine well as the season goes on, which is precisely the kind of decision-making axis I said I’d be watching all year. If that partnership does develop the way it looked like it might, it’ll be worth revisiting exactly how many of those box kicks start coming from a position of choice rather than default.
This is, of course, exactly the problem I keep running into with this wristband and rugby. It was built to measure athletes. It was not built to measure a man standing behind the posts with a coffee, mentally refereeing every ruck, quietly delighted every time three early tries turn a season opener into a laugher. There is no box on the WHOOP app for “spectator strain,” no colour-coded score for “watched a hat-trick inside twenty-one minutes and took it personally.” And yet here we are, one match into a new season, homework marked, questions half-answered, and I’ve apparently already logged a session’s worth of cardiovascular effort without so much as touching a rugby ball.
Forty-seven points, a hat-trick before half the ground had found their seats, a week to recover, and a wristband already bracing itself for the next nine months of this. Welcome back, National League Rugby. My WHOOP, on the other hand, is already reaching for the aspirin.
Seniormash Reflections in collaboration with TalkingRugbyUnion
Photos from Mark Ashcroft Collection with video clips on TalkingRugbyUnion Facebook
