- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Part one of Jake White’s master plan for a home final is complete; the Crusaders have accounted for the Reds in Christchurch, and his Brumbies have held out the Cheetahs in Canberra.
Interestingly, it seems the concept of knockout rugby and finals football remains lost on some people. For some reason, the expectation of teams playing for bonus points lives on into the finals series.
The style debate is always going to be there, it would seem.
And yes, it’s pretty hard to ignore the vastly different performances between the Crusaders and Brumbies in winning through to the next stage. And surely, at this part of the competition, the “winning through to the next stage” is the key point.
But no, the Brumbies-Cheetahs game wasn’t even 15 minutes old before I started seeing comments on social media lamenting the lack of sideline-to-sideline action.
Clearly, some just don’t realise that there is no room on Super Rugby’s three-legged spaceship cup for detailed descriptions of how visually pleasing the winning team was on the night.
I just don’t get this, I have to admit. I just cannot grasp why Australian rugby fans – and it seems to be localised to these shores – must add the extra proviso of aesthetics to winning.
Surely, by the time one of our teams is this deep into the competition we will just take the win. Why must we punish ourselves with style points, too?
Criticisms of the Brumbies methods in leading the Australian conference this year, and now the way they’ve won through to a semi-final showdown against the Bulls at Loftus Versfeld in Pretoria overlook the fact that only the Chiefs and Crusaders of the other finalists have scored more tries coming into the post-season.
And anyone suggesting the Brumbies should be winning as they did ten years ago can’t have watched too much of them in the years since then.
The equation is simple: Jake White has turned this team around in two seasons – a full year earlier than he expected himself – and it’s debatable just how many other coaches could have done that.
The desperate but at times clueless team trying to throw the ball around in 2010 or 2011 would be towelled up by this team of 2013.
The Brumbies considered the Cheetahs to be one of, if not the fittest side in Super Rugby, and they knew that they would finish fast.
Against some of the best tackling backrowers in the competition, they held parity in the breakdown. Both teams conceded similar number of turnovers, while the Brumbies made more clean breaks and beat more defenders.
More importantly, they conceded a lot less penalties in their own 22 than they have in recent games. This is an important factor heading to Pretoria, with Craig Joubert holding the whistle and the metronome boot of Morne Steyn waiting to punish such indiscretions.
The Brumbies will take a lot out of the way they’ve held out the British and Irish Lions, and now the Cheetahs, in similar, high stakes scenarios.
Players talk about ‘banking’ experiences and skill levels in certain circumstances, and defensively, the Brumbies have already spoken of using those ‘bankers’ in Pretoria.
The Cheetahs play with a lot more unstructured, second-phase play than do the Bulls, so the Brumbies will take a lot out of the way they held out those challenges for all but the final minute. The Bulls outside men have shown a liking for second phase and counter-attack this season, but not quite to the same extent as the Cheetahs.
The Brumbies defence is certainly good enough to repel this if they’re on their game.
Perhaps the best thing for the Brumbies to take out of their qualifying final win is that they still weren’t at their best, just as they also weren’t against the Lions. Character is built in winning those games in which the performance has lacked polish.
The Crusaders, unsurprisingly, have stormed into favouritism after a crushing display in Christchurch to dispose of the Reds.
In reality, it’s just another week for the Crusaders, who since the resumption from the June Internationals have similarly, ruthlessly accounted for the Highlanders, and the Chiefs, and then even when a bit off, were still too good for the Hurricanes in the final round.
This is a smart rugby team. Plenty of teams have plans for certain parts of the field, but few teams can make those plans so obvious and execute them as precisely as the Crusaders are currently.
There’s no better example than for the opening try of the night, to underrated centre Ryan Crotty.
With a five-metre scrum on the Reds’ try line, lock Sam Whitelock packed on the loosehead side, and pushed the Crusaders’ tight five through on the Reds to wheel them back into their own corner, taking the Reds’ flankers out of the defensive picture.
Andy Ellis clears in clean air, Dan Carter drifts to the left, and finds Crotty on his inside to score under the posts.
The try came about as perfectly as it would at training, and the plan was clear from the setup, yet the Reds were powerless to stop it.
It wasn’t going to be their night from that point onwards. The Crusaders are again playing with that same pressure-building, error-forcing, opportunity-creating game of the mid-2000s.
Is this the best they’ve ever played? That’s probably another argument for another day; they went undefeated to the title in 2002, lost only one game in 2006, and only two in both 2005 and 2008.
They lost five games in 2013 to finish fourth overall.
I wrote in an ESPNscrum.com preview coming into the playoffs that I could see the Super Rugby Champions coming from the likely all-New Zealand semi-final, and nothing has changed this thought, now that that match-up has been confirmed, except that now I’m probably leaning toward the Crusaders.
And that’s not withstanding my preferred outcome from the Bulls-Brumbies semi, and what that would mean for the final. I can already envisage head and heart not getting along that week, should a Brumbies-Crusaders decider materialise.
Of course, the Brumbies will need to find a lot of improvement to get that far.
Their last pass options haven’t necessarily been brilliant in recent outings, and that will be an obvious area to work on.
Likewise, winning in Pretoria won’t be easy, but the Brumbies will be buoyed by their all-but win at Loftus in Round 9 last year, and also by their defeat of the Bulls in Round 7 this year.
If the individual skill levels are ‘on’, the Brumbies game plan is good enough to beat the Bulls in a finals situation. Whether it’s good enough to beat the Crusaders, is another thing altogether.
And, of course, that game plan will never please everyone. Here is the following tweet from David Campese.
After watching the super rugby. I am so glad White miss out on the wallaby job.playing a SA team who scored 2 tries to nil. Not good
— David Campese (@Davidcampese11) July 21, 2013