Alright guys and gals, now that all sports have suddenly gone the way of the dodo due to the Coronavirus, we now have to find ways to keep ourselves entertained. In keeping with the spirit of keeping sports alive, or something, combined with the fact the Bent Axle doesn’t have a backlog of old game videos to show you, we’re going to try some new stuff here. Prepare yourself, are you ready? I’ll wait. Alright I’m done waiting.
The Bent Axle introduces (drum-roll): the Anatomy of a Play series. Where we’ll break down wheelchair rugby strategies, and yes plays, and explain them step by step. The series will start with the quintessential T Defense play.
Alright, let’s first set up the rugby court. I’m going to assume you have some base level of knowledge about wheelchair rugby, so I won’t go into too much description here, but we’ll look at just more than half of the court for this article. You’ll see the center court circle, the half court line, and one of the keys.
And for consistency throughout this series, the O’s will be offense and the X’s will be defense. The offense will have numbers in them from 1 to 4 indicating the order of who would handle the ball (1 is usually the highest functioning player, 4 is the least).
So, the T defense….why? What’s it for. The answer to all your questions is yes.
The T defense is set up as a zone press against a team inbounding from the baseline. If that is too deep for you, this may be too advanced of a course and you might want to find a wheelchair rugby 101, somewhere. What, that’s too mean and rugby 101 doesn’t exist? Fine, whatever, I’ll explain.
Here’s a typical T defense setup, notice how if you connect lines between the players, it makes a T shape [imagine mind blown GIF here].
This will make more sense later, but in the way I’ve set it up here, the position of 1 and 3 can be flipped (which side they’re set on
usually doesn’t matter). You typically want your fastest player where 2 is set up. If your fastest player is also your best defender, then put your second fastest player where 2 is set up. You always want your number 4 player set up where 4 is here for…let’s say logistical reasons. Again this will make more sense later.
The T defense I’ll be focusing on here is the contain T. In the contain, the 3 people low on the court (seen here as 1, 4, and 3) work to keep as many of the offensive players in front of them as possible. That means they want everyone to be between them and the baseline where the ball is being inbounded from.
Since this is a zone defense, each of these players theoretically has a zone they’re supposed to be guarding, as shown here.
Notice there is some overlap here, that means you and your team need to communicate well to make sure you’re all doing your jobs.
Here’s the central philosophy behind the T defense, you want to keep all of the offense out of the middle of the court.
In the back of your mind, when guarding your zone in this defense, you need to understand you want to keep the opposing team out of that red triangle. You want to push all of their players towards the sidelines and towards the baseline. The out-of-bounds-lines are your best friends, they are the 5th defender on the court, use them to your advantage!
Here’s a typical setup you will see when going into a T defense.
The green X indicates the offensive player who has the ball, in this image, that’s the inbounder. The high pointer will typically set up low, and to one side of the court, as you can see between the defense’s 1 and 4. The offense’s inbounder will most likely be their 2 or 3 player, this leaves their 4th player roaming deep, somewhere between the half court line and where the 3-point arc would be. Remember that everything would hold true if the mirror image of this setup occurs.
Assuming your team has rapidly transitioned to defense, which they should have, you’ll only truly be in the pure “T” formation for a few seconds maximum. Once you’re established in your defensive zone, you’ll need to move to cover, defend, and try to stop the defense. It will never stay as clean and well defined as you see in these diagrams, so be prepared to be dynamic.
For the sake of this article, so I don’t have to describe 17 million different scenarios, let’s assume everything is set up nicely and none of the movement or action occurs until the ball is inbounded, as you can see above.
BOOM, the ball is in. Oh dear god, what happens next!?
I’m glad you asked.
The design of this play, remember, is to find the person in your zone, match to them, and then try to push them away from the middle of the court. A zone is really just a fancy way to set up into an unassigned man-to-man defense.
In the scenario we’ve set up here, the ball is inbounded to the high pointer in the lower left part of the court.
When this happens, the defensive 1 and 4 clamp down on the offensive players, cutting them off on the sideline and baseline sides, pushing them further in the direction of the low left court. They also work to take away space. The more space people have, the easier it is for them to escape. Take away the space early and quickly, and you take away their options.
At the same time, the defensive 2 closes the gap to the offensive player that’s deep. The defender wants to initially deny that player from the ball, getting between the person they’re guarding and where the ball is on the court.
After the inbound happens, the inbounder will typically come onto the court the opposite side from where they inbounded to. In our scenario, the inbounder comes in on the right side of the court, near where our defensive 3 is.
I can’t stress this next point enough: if you are the defender on the wing opposite from where the ball is inbounded to, your primary job on defense is to stop the inbounder. The T defense breaks down 90% of the time because the, in our case 3 man, goes to help defend the ball instead of picking up the inbounder. Don’t try to be a hero, just try to be a good teammate.
The 4 man has a vital role in all of this, they prevent the ball handler from easily getting to from one side of the court to the other. The 4 role almost always needs to collapse on the side the ball goes to, as shown above. From there, they should focus on two things, picking out the ball handler’s picker, and trying to block the path along the baseline. Successfully doing this takes out the ball handler’s protection, and essentially cuts the court in half.
From here, it’s all about isolating the offensive players from each other, and blocking passing lanes. The less options the offense has, the more likely you are to get a stop, either from a 12 second call, timeout, or turnover from desperation. If you can, try to force them to pass; a turnover is much more likely to occur from an errant pass than from the ball handler being able to push up the court.
The bad news is that this is an offensive sport, and most of the time your defense will break down. The good news is that there’s a ton of different things you can do. I’m not going to cover all of them (at least not yet), but I’ll give one last piece before I sign off.
Let’s say the defense is breaking down, and the offense is starting to get loose. Bad. By now, though, they’ve used up at least 8 seconds of their 12 second count. Good. Although they’ve started moving, they need to get over the half court, and fast. Assuming all of the defense still holds contain positioning, the primary option for the ball handler is to pass.
It’s now, or actually a little before now, that the 2 man needs to make a transition. Until now, the 2 man has been playing deny on the deep offensive player, to keep them out of the play. This changes once everyone starts moving, the last thing your defense will want is an easy deep outlet pass after being solid on defense. The 2 man needs to work to gain top side, contain, positioning on the deep offensive player.
A well timed deny-contain switch will eliminate an easy out the ball handler is looking for, and may very well force a stop
If you’ve read up to now, I commend you, I definitely would’ve given up. What do you think about this? Agree? Disagree? Want more stuff like this? Let BA know by commenting below, you can head over to our forum, or yell at us on Twitter or Facebook ,
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