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The good news is that the Wallabies (as the ARU’s media statement on the Test proudly announced) have won back-to-back home victories in the 2014 Rugby Championship.
Moreover, given the Springboks’ splendid play against the All Blacks, the victory at Perth over South Africa must rate higher than we judged it.
The bad news is that the performance of the Wallabies in defeating the Pumas, just, at the Gold Coast revealed alarming weaknesses in the method of their play, with too many one-off hit-ups, a lack of the sort of fitness that sees players going full pelt towards the end of the game and, most worrying, a lack of match smarts by players who are supposed to be the brains of the side.
Will someone in the Wallabies coaching staff please tell Nick Phipps that teams that win big tournaments take the kick when it is on offer! And when the captain is yelling out for the kick to be taken, don’t try to play on.
A Roar reader following the excellent play-by-play description on the site made the point “There’s no I in team but there is two in idiot”. Great comment.
There is an aspect of Phipps’ play that annoys me. He is one of those players who seems to think that only interventions by himself can save the day for the Wallabies. Players of this mind often give away needless penalties, they get on the wrong side of referees with stupid comments, and then take quick taps when a shot at goal is the only real play to be taken.
This fetish for going to a quick tap or for a 5 metre lineout from a kickable position needs to be knocked on the head once and for all. Some IRB statistics compiled a couple of years ago revealed that the 5 metre lineout ploy was rarely successful.
Of course, commentators love captains or hot-headed players trying to seize the initiative. But in Tests the only thing that matters in the end is points on the board. So when points are gifted to you, take the kick!
Someone needs to tell Jean de Villiers this, too. With six minutes of play left in the Test, and the scoreline favouring the All Blacks 14-10, the Springboks were finally on a roll. They had been starved of possession and field position most of the Test. But now they were awarded a penalty virtually in front of the All Blacks posts, and from about 25 metres out.
A successful kick would have narrowed the margin to 14 – 13 to the All Blacks. Take the kick!
A successful shot at goal meant that the Springboks could then win the match with another penalty or a drop goal. Handre Pollard had already kicked one of these from long range, he could easily do it again.
Instead the Springboks went for a 5 metre lineout. They won a penalty from their first collapsed driving maul. The time all this took meant they had to try the ploy again, and the All Blacks disrupted their lineout. Play went across the field, with the Springboks barging towards the All Blacks line. There was an All Blacks scrum and then a final Springboks scrum.
The Springboks could have headed the ball over the posts from this scrum. But they had to score a try. Play ended with the All Blacks winning a lineout and and then a scrambling ruck (shades of the Rugby World Cup 2011 final) before Aaron Smith booted the ball into the stands.
This description reveals that a lot of play can be fitted into those last few minutes. If the Springboks had been within one point of the All Blacks I reckon they would have been in a situation where they could have forced a penalty or kicked a drop goal to snatch a victory.
Incidentally, when the National Rugby Championship called for suggestions for new rules to be added on to the laws of rugby, I suggested a five-minute rule where the clock is stopped when play stops and starts when the play is resumed. American football has a similar two-minute rule. A rugby five-minute rule would increase the number of tight finishes, something that fans love to see.
Only 14,281 spectators bothered to watch the Wallabies play the Pumas at the Gold Coast. A sparse crowd like this is dispiriting for the players and takes away from any sense of occasion that Tests should create.
Australia rugby does not have the luxury that New Zealand and South African rugby have of being able to play a Test anywhere in their country and get a good crowd. The ARU needs to be quite brutal about this. The Perth Test against the Springboks attracted over 28,000 spectators. But at the Sydney Football Stadium you’d expect a crowd of over 40,000.
And there would have been a much larger crowd for the Test against the Pumas at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane.
The SFS, Allianz Stadium at Homebush, and Suncorp Stadium at Brisbane should be the designated Test stadiums by the ARU. There are dedicated rugby supporters in Sydney and Brisbane who will give the Tests there the atmosphere they deserve.
Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England play only an occasional Test (very occasional, in fact) outside of their main rugby stadium. It is time for the ARU to be more exclusive with its Test match ground allocations.
Rugby is a perplexing game. It is chess with the pieces capable of smashing each other. Over the weekend we had two Tests, one of them a mistake-ridden affair with the Wallabies defeating the Pumas (just) and the other a hard-shouldered, occasionally brilliant (as with the Cornal Hendricks try) and always exciting, with the All Blacks defeating the Springboks (just).
Atmosphere plays a large part in the performance of the players. At Wellington the atmosphere was charged with the power of the fabled history of Springboks and All Blacks Tests. The players and the spectators knew they were part of a sequence of Tests going back to 1921 that have been red-blooded, confrontational affairs with the result meaning a lot to the respective rugby communities.
The players and the referee rose to the spirit of the occasion. But there was nothing like this at the Gold Coast.
The ARU needs to understand that Tests are Tests, they are not the occasion for some missionary activity in hostile sporting territory. The NRC or the occasional Super Rugby match fits this sort of occasion.
The Wallabies looked to be without much structure and too much thought in their play. They started brilliantly and then fell away quite dramatically. It was as if they had not been enthused by the sense of occasion the Test should have provoked in them.
Eddie Jones made the comment last week that if he had the Wallabies he would be spending a large part of the time leading up to the 2015 Rugby World Cup tournament ‘conditioning’ the players. Getting them much fitter and stronger, in other words. This is what Michael Cheika did with the Waratahs and their results proved him right.
Many people have suggested to me that Ewen McKenzie seems to have ditched all the structures the Waratahs had in their play. There is something in this. McKenzie is deliberately forcing the Wallabies to discard any of their Waratahs characteristics. In turn, this seems to be part of an effort to distinguish himself from anything that Cheika has done with the Waratahs.
Why? People who know McKenzie believe that he has a massive ego, which is not necessarily a bad thing for a leader, as the coach of the Wallabies has to be. But when the McKenzie ego works against the interests of his team, then it is a bad thing.
The Wallabies in 2014 should be the Waratahs Mach 2, just like the All Blacks for many years have been (and still are probably) the Crusaders Mach 2.
But for the Wallabies to be a better version of the Waratahs there would needs to be some consideration of the role of Michael Cheika in creating the original model. And McKenzie is not into giving Cheika, a rival for the Wallabies coaching position sooner or later, any credit for the successes of his team.
An example of the McKenzie ego came up in the media conference after the game when Scott Allen, whose rugby analyses on The Roar are unrivalled in Australia, asked whether he was happy with the play of 4-5-6 in the Wallabies middle row. This is a very valid question, especially as the Wallabies scrum started to shatter at the end of the Test.
McKenzie put down Allen with the suggestion that he had access to all the statistics and implied that the basis to the question was a false one.
I am always wary about coaches who use statistics without the insight on how the statistics might be created. We all know the various jokes about about statistics: lies, damn lies and statistics; statistics are like bikinis, what they reveal is interesting but what they conceal is crucial.
You don’t need a spreadsheet to tell you that the Wallabies middle row is not functioning as it should. Changes are needed. The coach should acknowledge this.
How is it, too, that the Waratahs played with zest, energy, speed and structure and the Wallabies, aside from another brilliant star on Saturday, looked to be flat and essentially clueless about the plays they should be running?
The success of the Waratahs in winning 2014 Super Rugby tournament and the way they achieved this victory offered the Wallabies coach a blueprint to create a special Wallabies team leading into the 2015 Rugby World Cup.
At this stage in the journey, the transformation of the Wallabies is off the pace, a bit like the side’s lacklustre play against a spirited Pumas side.