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When I completed my tipping list on The Roar I told myself that this was one of the easiest rounds ever to pick the winners.
I dutifully ticked the obvious winners, the Crusaders, Brumbies, Chiefs, Sharks, Bulls, Waratahs, and on a hunch and to be slightly different from some of the other tipsters, the Hurricanes.
The Crusaders, Brumbies, Sharks, Bulls and Waratahs were playing at home which made their selection an even more obvious choice. The Chiefs were playing the Blues at Albany, which used to be one of their home grounds when they were aligned with the North Harbour province. This meant that the Blues were away from their fortress, Eden Park. Easy peasy.
So the only unconditional away win pick I made was the Hurricanes.
And on Saturday morning I was fortified when I read The Australian‘s picks and found that their experts agreed with me on the Crusaders, Brumbies (with the exception of Wayne Smith who, as a diehard supporter, picked the Reds), Chiefs, Sharks, Bulls and Waratahs.
And there was a 3-2 split in favour of the Hurricanes.
I am writing this right after the Waratahs’ stunning loss to the Western Force. It is fair to say that I am in a state of shock. Four of the teams that virtually everyone believed would win their home match (Crusaders, Sharks, Bulls and Waratahs), and be in the finals at the end of the round robin, were knocked over by their opponents.
These teams could all be in the finals but they will all have to lift their games significantly. Are they capable of this?
Next week will provide evidence of a revival or a decline of the Super Rugby tournament favourites with the Waratahs playing the Rebels at Melbourne, the Bulls playing the Hurricanes at Pretoria, the Crusaders against the Highlanders (who had a bye in the first round) at Dunedin and the Sharks playing the Lions at home.
Right now, though, I am trying to make some sense of the dramatic opening round of Super Rugby 2015.
Going through my notes I came across an article written by Georgina Robinson in The Sydney Morning Herald dated April 4, 2014: The away curse: Super Rugby teams pay the penalty for playing away from home.
In the first 16 matches of the 2014 season, Robinson noted, not one travelling team to South Africa, and there had been 16 of them from Australia and New Zealand, had recorded a victory.
The reason for this, alongside the difficulty involved in the long trip across the Indian Ocean, was incompetent refereeing which just happened to benefit the home side.
SANZAR, to its credit, did a mid-season purge. The refereeing list for this season is greatly improved in quality on last season’s list. And in South Africa, two of the first round matches were refereed by Australian referees with Rohan Hoffman running the Lions-Hurricanes match and Andrew Lees handling the Sharks-Cheetahs match.
Overall, aside from these two referees who were excellent, the standard of the refereeing was high. Except for the Waratahs-Western Force match, the games flowed and were good value for spectators and viewers at home. I thought that Steve Walsh was far too patient with the deliberate time-wasting tactics of the Waratahs and a match which was full of errors anyway was made more unpalatable by the win-ugly tactics of the Force.
A feature of the refereeing was the way that defending sides were required by all the referees to roll away from the tackled player. Tacklers who accidentally on purpose or just accidentally rolled the wrong way and killed the ball were penalised.
In my view this is the most important interpretation brought into rugby for years. What it means is that attacking teams that commit players to the ruck, provided the presentation is efficient, can get the quick recycling that allows flowing attacks.
It forces both teams to send players into the rucks, the attacking side to recycle and the defending side to have a chance of slowing down the ball in the contest, or even force a turnover.
The point of the ruck, like the lineout and scrum, is to allow a legal contest for possession and to enable some one-on-one contests in the backs.
The interpretation, which I first saw Craig Joubert using, is now standard practice in both the southern and northern hemispheres and it has greatly helped sides that run with the ball when they get the chance.
So in the case of the Hurricanes they were able to get points, through penalties and tries, when they made their rare raids into the Lions’ territory.
The Force, too, by throwing in players into the rucks, were able to disrupt the Waratahs’ game plan of standing off forwards who should have been cleaning out in the rucks (Benn Robinson, for instance) but were in the running line by slowing down possession and often turning it over.
This was most obvious at the end of the match when the Waratahs threw everything at the Force and were driven back from being well inside the Force’s territory to being inside their own 22.
The need to clean out the rucks when trying to score a long-range try was demonstrated when 13 All Blacks handled the ball, several of them several times, to score after time against Ireland in 2013 to win the Test. Two players, Richie McCaw and Brodie Retallick, did not handle the ball. McCaw and Retallick, though, cleaned out virtually every ruck in that memorable try.
I was thinking of this when watching the Crusaders being belted in the rucks by the well-coached Rebels.
Coach Todd Blackadder has the equivalent of a tin air when it comes to rugby coaching. It was obvious by half-time, for instance, that the Rebels were dominating the Crusaders at the breakdown. Matt Todd was being out-played in the rucks while McCaw was being wasted playing in the number 6 zone.
Why didn’t he move McCaw to number 7 and Todd to the number 6 role, which actually suits his style as he is a runner and tackler rather than a fetcher? And why wasn’t McCaw made captain in the absence of Kieran Read?
Blackadder inherited a team in 2009 that had won the Super Rugby title the year before, and was the dominant and title-winning side up to then. The Crusaders have not won a Super Rugby title since 2008. Moreover, the style that won the title in 2008 and all the previous titles has not been changed.
The best coaches in the modern era, Rod Macqueen, Sir Graham Henry and Steve Hansen, have come through school and club rugby and up through the provincial levels to, say, Super Rugby. Blackadder has not done this. He moved from playing to coaching in the professional game. I wonder if this sort of preparation really prepares coaches to be successful at the professional level.
Tony McGahan has coached at all levels, schools, provincial and Test level as an assistant with the Wallabies under Robbie Deans. You could see from the intelligent, confident way the Rebels went about their game against the Crusaders that their coach had given them a plan (to attack the Crusaders at the rucks and on the gain line with hard-shouldered running) that they were confident with implementing.
I noticed, for instance, that instead of the one-off-the-ruck running, they adopted the French system used in the 2015 Rugby World Cup final of using runners three off the ruck. This forced the Crusaders to spread their defensive line and opened up little gaps near the rucks.
It is remarkable that the Rebels recorded their first win outside of Australia against the Crusaders. McGahan, like Michael Cheika, is in his second year with the Rebels. He started last season well and then the side fell away. A win against the Waratahs next week, with the Waratahs having a short turnaround and being vulnerable because of this, will be the test for the Rebels to prove that they are more than a flash-in-the-pan side.
I was impressed with their uncompromising and smart play against the Crusaders and, right now, am inclined to think that McGahan has his side on track for a very strong season.
I know that the Crusaders have lost three out of their last four opening round matches, but this loss was so unexpected that you wonder if a Houdini act is within the team this season.
The Brumbies, on the other hand, looked terrific. There was a toughness about their forward play and a ruthlessness and speed about their back play that took you back to their golden days when the esprit and method of the franchise was created.
Again, it is early days but for me the Brumbies were the most impressive of the Australian sides. Stephen Larkham has kept the set piece excellence that was Jake White’s gift to the team. And he has grafted onto this the old Brumbies ball-in-hand ensemble game, with a back four that has power and speed.
David Pocock showed that he is still a force as a fetcher and tackler. His running still lacks speed and a certain explosiveness. But his strong, close-quarters game is better suited to the attrition of Test rugby than Michael Hooper’s speed game.
I refrain from commenting about the Reds, except to reiterate the point that Richard Graham has given no indication at any stage in his career that he is up to the job of head coach of a Super Rugby franchise.
American sports have demonstrated that the more professional the code the more crucial is the role of the coach. I believe that Cheika demonstrated last season that he is up to the job at Super Rugby level. But he faces a big task of getting the Waratahs up for next weekend, and then for the rest of the season.
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Teams go after the champions. This can make or break the champions. Quite simply, the Waratahs were not up for the Western Force on Sunday. They made elementary mistakes. They missed tackles. And they kicked far too much. Even Israel Folau kicked when they were chasing points.
Admittedly, it was hot, 28 degrees and the ball was slippery. But the Waratahs played into the hands of the Force by allowing the game to be slowed down and by committing stupid mistakes that resulted in Force tries and penalties. In trying to tweak the Waratahs game plan, Cheika is in danger of losing its greatest strength – the continuous, rolling ensemble ball-in-hand game.
And what happened to the famed Nathan Gray defensive patterns that allowed the Force, who hardly played any real rugby on Sunday, to score four tries (along with the Brumbies) and win a bonus point victory?
And one final complaint. Why did SANZAR allow the Force to wear a light blue jersey and dark blue shorts as their away outfit against the home Waratahs side playing in a slightly bluer jersey and dark blue shorts? This was gamesmanship on the part of the Force that should have been stopped by officials if they had even an ounce of nous about these matters.