Loose Pass: No harm in Quade Cooper-Marcus Smith chats and farewell to a New Zealand legend in the USA

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with information exchange, triumphant finales and the return of the real July Tests…

It’s fair to say that the revelation that Quade Cooper and Marcus Smith occasionally swap a bit of rugby chat did not shake the earth to its foundations in the same way as, say Eddie Jones talking to, frankly, anyone not English, would have.

But Loose Pass wonders now, and especially as it did then, why it would bother anybody anyway.

Whom would it damage if, for example, Jones revealed to an opposing player that Owen Farrell preferred tackling with his right shoulder, or that Freddie Steward didn’t like receiving kicks on the left side of the pitch, or that Will Stuart had a habit of boring in under pressure?

Any of those players? If those were things Jones was not saying to their faces or at the very least during their analysis, THEN we would have a foundation-shaking problem. But given the reams and reams of anecdotal evidence that Jones tells players as it is as bluntly as is humanly possible, this is unlikely.

The most precious information a player and coach has before a game is the specifics of the game-plan heading into it, and the lines and details of the training ground moves that have been drawn up and run through. All other information is, for all intensive purposes, out there on the hours of video and experience in the heads of players who have played a bit.

For a coach to let slip to the opposition that a player had a weakness in his game would actually be that coach giving that player an ultimate test: a match situation in which the opposition might repeatedly attack that weakness. It can break a player for sure, but only if he were not good enough to recognise and respond.