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Lest we forget.
This time of the year is always a poignant time for Australians and New Zealanders with the memory of Anzac Day and the history, national and familial, that the intrepid attacks on the Gallipoli beachheads invokes.
Before the Super Rugby matches involving Australian and New Zealand teams locally over the weekend, there was the moving spectacle of the Ode of Remembrance being recited and the Last Post resounding around the deathly quiet stadiums, the crowds still silent as the plangent last broken note faded into an oblivion of sound.
At Dunedin, before the bruising Highlanders 14-15 Sharks match, the Ode was recited in Maori before the more familiar English original. And the official match ball carrier was 93 year-old World War II veteran Lance Corporal Duncan Alexander Peat.
I am a great believer that an essential element in any existing institution is a memory and the honouring of the past. Modern rugby must always honour the fact that many of the men involved in the Gallipoli expedition, the subsequent fighting on all the other fronts and in every theatre of the Word War II (like Lance Corporal Peat) were rugby men to their heart and bones.
Brett McKay in several articles on The Roar recently has made the point that the Super Rugby schedule for 2016, unlike previous years, paid scant respect to the Anzac tradition. There was only one Australia-New Zealand contest, the Brumbies-Crusaders match, where in the past we have had up to three such games.
The finger of suspicion at this neglect of what should be a tradition has been pointed at the Canadian firm that was contracted to provide the schedule. The point here is that the Canadians might not have realised the importance of Anzac Day in the sensibilities of Australians and New Zealanders.
It could be, too, that the complications of creating a schedule involving matches in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Argentina, Japan and Singapore proved too daunting to include a specific Anzac Day component.
Among my many objections to the uncaring attitude shown to matters of concern from the rugby public in Australia and New Zealand by SANZAAR is the fact that issues likes this are never even acknowledged, let alone explained with any convincing answers.
So what should happen now is that SANZAAR starts to be mindful of the concerns of rugby supporters out of South Africa and begin to engage with all of us. SANZAAR could start with the promise that the Anzac Day round in 2017 will be treated as something very special for Australian and New Zealand rugby supporters.
SANZAAR needs to be aware that there is a growing backlash, especially in New Zealand, against it based on the grounds, apparently, that the chief executive Andy Marinos works in South Africa and that there seems to have been an extremely kind schedule created for the Stormers.
The punch line here is that Marinos played for the Stormers.
Now back to Anzac Day, World War I and its rugby implications.
The NSWRU in its annual report in 1919 paid tribute to the 384 players and officials who were killed in action.
To celebrate the return to normality at the end of World War I a great rugby tournament was played in England. The King’s Cup featured teams from England (mainly officers), Australia (only a handful of officers), Canada and New Zealand.
The AIF team won a brutal match against the New Zealanders, 6-5. But the tournament was won by the New Zealanders.
That AIF team was then asked to tour Australia to revive the rugby game there. So many club players volunteered for overseas service that club rugby in NSW and Queensland was put on hold. Rugby needed a special series of spectacles to regain even a small part of the ground gained by league which continued its club competitions during the War.
That spectacle came with the brilliant, all-running, highly physical game played by the AIF team.
A measure of how good this team was can be gained from the fact that on its way back to Australia the AIF team played Natal and defeated that strong side 34-3.
In Australia the AIF team played eight matches and won them all. The old men of the AIF beat a younger team representing Australia in two Tests, in Brisbane 20-13 and then in Sydney 22-6.
One of the great men of Australian rugby Peter Crittle invariably makes the point that the AIF team created what became for a time and should be now the model for how Australian rugby teams should play.
The AIF players were made physically and mentally tough through their war experience. As a consequence, they played their rugby for the pure enjoyment of the running game.
Kicking was not allowed, even from deep defensive positions near their try line. Attack became their best form of defence.
This AIF running rugby model was adopted, with some slight modifications, by the wonderful 1920 Wallabies, the 1921 Wallabies (who defeated the All Blacks), the 1928-29 Wallabies on their tour of Europe and the 1931 Wallabies who won Australia’s first Test series against the All Blacks.
In the mud of the SCG in 1937, a NSW team playing the AIF running game in the mud and the rain defeated the touring Springboks side. Evan Whitton, the great rugby writer, reckoned (admittedly before the Rugby World Cup 1999 triumph) that this victory was Australia’s greatest day in rugby.
Those 1937 Springboks, anyway, went on to win the first Test series the All Blacks lost in New Zealand and gained the reputation from impressed New Zealanders of being “the best team ever to leave New Zealand.”
In the 1980s the torch of AIF running rugby was held aloft by a series of great Randwick ‘Galloping Greens’ sides with champions like David Campese, the Ella brothers, Lloyd Walker, and Simon Poidevin leading the stampede.
Bob Dwyer made the point recently when arguing for greater ARU funding for the clubs that make up the Sydney and Brisbane competitions that four of the last eight Wallabies coaches (Bob Dwyer, Eddie Jones, Ewen McKenzie, Michael Cheika) have been from the Randwick club.
This is a tribute to the rugby nous generated by the Randwick Galloping Greens in their glory days when even the All Blacks found the club side difficult to defeat.
The current argument between Eddie Jones and Daryl Gibson over what the current Waratahs coach is trying to do in changing the style of the Waratahs from the Cheika method fits into this AIF running rugby history.
Gibson is the good guy in this argument and Jones the baddie.
Gibson provoke the wrath of Jones when he made the argument that “here in NSW we’re wanting to investigate to make sure our pathways and our kids coming through are taught the skills that we think are necessary to play running rugby.”
And why does Gibson think this sort of investigation of the lack of skills necessary to play running rugby is needed?
“It’s a structural thing. The difficulty for us is, I think, the Eddie Jones era of playing A,B,C-certain type of rugby. The lack of decision making has had an effect on Australian rugby in the fact that it’s very pervasive in the schooling system. And then so we tend to get our boys at 18 and probably their skills are very good but just missing that decision-making skill in the open environment.”
Last week Jones virtually conceded the truth of Gibson’s argument (and shot down his own arguments) when he told British rugby writers that rugby has to become reactive: “It is no longer an obsession with formation … It is no longer the shape you play, but how you move in relation to the speed of the ball and what the defence is doing.
“That is the way rugby is going … It is highly instinctive, multi-phase, ball-moving, continuous rugby.”
You could not get a more explicit and devastating attack on the uselessness of the Jones robot-rugby method. And, irony of ironies, it has come from Jones the Coach himself.
We saw just how thrilling and match-winning this AIF running rugby model can be in the brilliant, exciting, body-shattering Hurricanes-Chiefs match when from the kick-off for the second half the teams passed the ball 45 times! They kept the ball in play for over four minutes (is this a record sequence?) with turnovers and kicks from one side to the other before the Chiefs finally scored.
The great captain of the AIF team William Watson (who won a DSO in World War II and fought on the Kokoda Trail) would have been thrilled with this spectacle of running rugby.
He would have been thrilled, too, with the new Waratahs and their splendid 49-13 demolition, playing AIF running rugby, of their bogey team the Western Force.
I called the Waratahs the ‘new Waratahs’ because Gibson has brought in six new (from 2015) starters, Tom Robertson, Hugh Roach, Jack Dempsey, Jed Holloway, Andrew Kellaway, and Reece Robinson.
The experiment of starting Israel Folau at centre is no longer an experiment. Folau’s experience as a league winger seems to have helped him with the intricate defensive decisions a centre needs to make. He needs no experience to unleash his instinctive attacking game.
The new Waratahs created their highest score ever against the Force. They looked like a team ready to storm back into contention for the Super Rugby title.
This last aspiration needs to be tested by stronger teams than the Force, however. The tour to South Africa with the Stormers at Capetown applying the acid on the Waratahs will be an instant test of Gibson’s revival of his embattled side.
One last point needs to be made. Michael Cheika left Gibson a poisoned chalice with a Waratahs run-on squad that had no growth in it. Too many players well past their best were kept in the Cheika Waratahs.
Gibson has revived the side with his infusion of young talent, players who have a real intent to play the running game.
Question of the day: Has Michael Cheika got the rugby balls to do the Gibson thing with his 2016 Wallabies?