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Wellington: Well, that’s not gone well. Even though we knew it was possible, I don’t know that too many Australian fans seriously entertained the thought of an all-New Zealand Super Rugby final next Saturday.
If it’s fair to say the Brumbies weren’t envisaging a 20-point semi-final thumping, then it’s fair to say the Waratahs were expecting an 18-point loss at home even less.
But here were are, with the Hurricanes set to host the Highlanders, an eighth overall Super Rugby champion assured, and only head-scratching on the western side of the ditch.
When both the Brumbies and Waratahs get around to reviewing their semi-final losses – ‘if’, in the players’ case – they will ultimately conclude that the games were won and lost in one area.
Defence.
Yeah, yeah. Defence wins big games. Always has, always will. It’s an idiom old enough to fall into cliché.
However, for all the talk of the attacking ability of the four semi-finalists, and their various preferred methods of constructing tries, it felt this week coming into the games like defence had been bumped down the priority list.
The stats sheets tell the story for both Australian teams.
The Brumbies missed 32 of 160 tackles for the match. The Waratahs missed 24 of 123 tackles and conceded 15 turnovers to 11.
If you’re missing one tackle in every five attempts, you’re going to lose more games than you win. And pretty much every knockout match you play.
Upfront, let me declare that I still haven’t seen the first half of the Waratahs-Highlanders game, and that I may or may not have been at the bar when the 57th minute penalty try was awarded. But the number of texts and tweets I received thereafter tell me it’s going to be a major talking point.
And that would be a touch misguided in my humble opinion. Because by that stage of the game, even trailing by only three points, the Tahs seemed more intent on the niggle. Whether it was a deliberate tactic or whatever, the Highlanders were the team to galvanise the best – and quickest – from the various skirmishes.
If they’re honest with themselves, the Waratahs will see they really didn’t play a lot of rugby in the last half an hour, and that they were forced into exactly the type of mistakes they hoped their physicality would draw out of the Highlanders.
The Brumbies’ issues were a bit more widespread than that.
Missing 20 per cent of tackles for a match isn’t brilliant, but it’s even worse when broken down to reveal that they missed just six of 73 in the second half. If you’re doing the backward maths, you’ve already worked out that they missed 26 of 87 tackles in the first forty. It was also nine Hurricanes clean breaks to one at half-time.
And that’s why Hurricanes coach Chris Boyd conceded that his side “left plenty of points out there” in the first half. Even if it was only half of the five or six tries hypothesised by the press conference question, that’s still upwards of 20 points.
Brumbies captain Stephen Moore could only agree post-match that the Hurricanes’ defence was just outstanding.
“I think a lot was said about their attack, and rightly so, but I thought their defence was terrific,” he said.
“They covered the field well and put us under pressure there, particularly early on. We had some good ball there at the end of the first half and they held us out. And you do need good defence like that to win the competition, there’s no doubt. That will hold them in good stead next week.
“We spoke before the game about the importance of first-up tackles, and they carry the ball really well and it is difficult. They’re hard to bring down – certainly harder than what we were up against last week.
“We knew it was going to be tough and it was. They stick to a really rigid sort of attacking structure, where they play the middle of the field and then try to expose you on the edges, and that leads to those one-on-ones which they took full advantage of. It was difficult to defend.”
And that’s a pretty fair assessment.
What was interesting post-match was to then hear Conrad Smith talk of how the Hurricanes wanted to post early points so they could get into the defensive plan that they thought would win them the game.
“The type of team the Brumbies are, if they get a lead, they can really strangle the game,” Smith said.
“Whereas we thought that if we could get points on the board and they had to chase the game, that it could work in our favour as they try to play a game that they probably don’t like to play as much.
“I thought we defended very well. We just didn’t give them a lot of opportunity. They’re a team who like to get a lot of territory and put you under pressure, but we got out of exits zones really well.
“I felt like we were always able to take the initiative.”
Bang on the money.
It would be easy to look at two trans-Tasman Super Rugby semis, and look forward to the now all-New Zealand final, and conclude that the Wallabies will have issues going forward to the World Cup.
But it should also be the opportunity to recognise that for all the talk of backline combinations and x-factor and all that, that at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, etc, etc, preventing points in the biggest games is far more important than scoring them yourself.
And that’s something for Australian rugby to think about on our sudden week off.