Rugby Games and Drills: Book Review

Rugby Games and Drills

Written by RFU National Academy Fitness Advisor Simon Worsnop this book has over 115 training exercises for improving technique, tactics and fitness.

The book is split into 10 chapters:

1. Using Games and Drills
2. Small sided handling games
3. Small sided kicking games
4. Attacking and Defending drills
5. Bag and Shield drills
6. Non-specific rugby games
7. Small sided rugby games
8. Large sided rugby games
9. Fitness requirements for rugby
10. Planning for the season

Each chapter has a variety of different drills, enabling the coach to keep sessions fresh, as well as covering a range of different scenarios to test skills in game specific situations. Each exercise also comes with variations in complexity, physicality and specificity.

The drills are set out clearly with both written instructions and visual diagrams to make it easy to follow, with objectives and key coaching points highlighted to maintain focus of the exercises.

Each exercise also has a suitability rating at the top of the page e.g. 12+ or All ages, however they are not necessarily in age order so finding an appropriate drill requires searching (although this is only a minor point, searching won’t take long).

For coaches and players who may be short on time (this is the real world) and need to train multiple skills in on session, e.g. half backs passing/kicking and back row forwards tackling, there is a useful ‘Game and Drill Finder’ at the start of the book which cross references each of the drills with all the skills being worked.

What could be better

The Chapter that lets this book down is the fitness requirements for rugby. There is a lot of detail about the requirements for rugby, from strength and power values to work capacity and speed.

Despite this, there is no practical advice for coaching these components. Simon touches briefly on using small sided games and technical drills to also develop work capacity; however the inclusion of general fitness work is also vital.

Some practical tips for strength training, starting from foundation exercises and gradually progressing, would have been a useful inclusion.

Summary

I would recommend this book for any coach of junior or senior rugby players looking to improve delivery of technical coaching, as the variety of drills and simplicity of explanations make it a very useful tool.

The Season Planning section would be extremely useful to coaches with information on long term planning (different phases of season) and short term planning (individual sessions), as well as written examples of each.

To read more of Simon’s insights into conditioning for Rugby, see here 

See our full list of top books for rugby coaches

Matt Durber