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How many times in the last week-and-a-bit have you heard or read someone attempt to put the Wallabies’ successive and outstanding Rugby World Cup wins over England and Wales into the broader context?
And how far up the list did they put them?
I was asked during a radio spot last weekend where the England win ranked, and whether it was the best one I’d seen.
The question will undoubtedly be asked again this week, after the Wallabies’ outstanding defensive effort against Wales at Twickenham on Saturday.
For what it’s worth, I told ABC Grandstand Breakfast that the England win would have to sit up alongside the 2003 semi-final win over New Zealand, in terms of importance.
But where do these twin wins rank in the grand scheme of Wallabies history? And how different would my rankings be to the next person’s, when it’s obviously such a subjective exercise?
I mean, even if I limit things to my lifetime, there’s still a Grand Slam in there and even a couple of Bledisloe Cup wins in Auckland well back in the day. It’s still bloody hard to narrow anything down.
So I’m not going to bother attempting to rank anything. And I’m going to wind the timeframe in more, too, to the period from the 1991 Rugby World Cup win onwards.
I can remember watching the Ella brothers, Mark and Glen, tearing up the SCG as a kid in the 1980s. But it was really that 1991 World Cup win, with Nick Farr-Jones exclaiming “Oh, wow!” as Her Majesty handed over the Webb Ellis trophy up in the old grandstands of Twickenham, that first got me excited about watching and playing the great game.
And logically, the 1991 and 1999 titles are obvious additions. In terms of pure importance to Australian rugby, they probably rank one and two.
Certainly, the period after the ’91 victory led to a massive popularity surge for the game in Australia, but that time also saw the first seed of professionalism being planted. More and more top players around the country were being courted by, and indeed, switching to rugby league.
Tim Horan on Fox Sports’ Rugby Legends series of interviews confirmed that he’d given a handshake agreement to join North Sydney before his serious knee injury in 1994, and he wouldn’t have been on his own.
In some ways, the arrival of Rupert Murdoch’s money and Super League was very good for rugby, because it spawned Kerry Packer’s involvement in the World Rugby Corporation movement that very nearly pulled off the same sort of game-changing coup.
Ultimately, rugby would also follow Murdoch, and through the formation of SANZAR, the Super Rugby and Tri Nations/Rugby Championship era was upon us.
By 1999, with a couple of years of professionalism under their belt, the next great Wallabies era had arrived, and the Rugby World Cup title at the magnificent new Millennium Stadium in Cardiff absolutely confirmed that Australia was indeed the best side in the world.
But do the England and Wales wins in the last 10 days sit behind, alongside, or in front of those two pivotal moments in the game? I think it’s too hard to say, right at this point. In a month’s time they may well sit up there, but in a month’s time, they might be superseded too.
The 2003 semi-final win over the All Black is an obvious entrant into this debate, too, and it was the peak moment of a tournament in Australia that really should have set up the game nationally for much, much longer than it did (or didn’t, as the harsh reality emerged, years later). By 2003, it was very cool to wear a Wallabies jersey around, and indeed Test tickets were highly sought after as a proper big event experience.
Making the final in the tournament you were hosting was seen as massively important, just as it was for New Zealand in 2011, and as England are finding out in the worst possible fashion currently. And sure, had Jonny Wilkinson’s right-footed drop goal sprayed away from the posts, a Wallabies win in 2003 would’ve been – and still would be – the greatest moment in the history of the game in, like, forever. Or at least in Australia, anyway.
And if I’m putting the win over England last week up there in the same theatre as these three wonderful wins, then it has to follow that the Wales win goes in there too. For very different reasons, those two wins have to rate as the best we’ve ever seen from this group of players. Michael Cheika’s satisfied grin as he walked down the Twickenham stairs on Sunday tells me he rates it the same way.
So there you go; the England and Wales wins are in the top five. Easily. Comfortably even, and that’s even coming from a field that includes such gems as the ’99 semi-final win over South Africa, and the 2000 Bledisloe Test in Wellington, and Bloemfontein in 2010, among numerous others.
If you wanted to really get down to the nitty gritty – and I’m sure some of you will – you could quite easily come up with a different top five on pure performance alone.
But on importance? I’m not so sure. Even while consciously wanting to keep a lid on things, it’s hard not to think of what this group of players might be able to achieve. The England win was massive in the context of this tournament, and it opened the window to topping the Pool of Death.
I don’t think it could be topped in terms of important wins by anything in the last decade, and was convinced it would take some topping any time soon, too.
And then, only a week later, Adam Ashley-Cooper ran out of the line on Sunday and clattered into Dan Biggar…