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When Allister Coetzee selected Morne Steyn as his starting number 10 it was obvious how the Springboks were going to try to win their Test against the Wallabies at Loftus Versfeld stadium. They were going to kick their way to victory with the back-to-the-future rugby that won the Springboks the 2007 RWC.
All the wash-up from Springboks vs Wallabies:
» LORD: Steyn’s boot sinks wasteful Wallabies
» Who should replace Sean McMahon?
» The Wrap: Back to the future not for the better
» DIY Player Ratings results
» Five talking points
» What changes should the Wallabies make for Argentina?
» Match report: Wallabies fall short
» Re-live all the action with our live blog
» Watch highlights from the match
And this is what happened. Steyn kicked four out of five penalties and two drop goals. This was back-to-the-future rugby. Predictable and, unfortunately, lethal against a Wallabies side that played as if it didn’t expect the Springboks to play the Steyn game.
It isn’t as if the Wallabies haven’t been familiar with Steyn’s game. He had almost a decade of Super Rugby and has had a long and essentially successful career at Test rugby.
The Springboks forwards formed a wall – legally – for the drop goals. But the Wallabies did not apply the pressure on the kicker to at least make his strike more hurried.
Steyn, to his credit, was as nonchalant as a golfer tapping in a gimme putt.
Kicking drop goals is an unrated skill. Steyn is a good as any player has been, along with Jonny Wilkinson, in the modern era. You know, as with Wilkinson, that he is going to convert pressure into points if given the chance. The Springboks were barely in the Wallabies’ 22 for any periods of time.
So this knack of taking gratuitous points, which the drop kick really is, was the key to the Springboks winning a Test they should have really lost.
The drop kick tactic is a skill that in my opinion, though, is over-valued in the points scoring system in rugby.
I am so old that I played in an era when the drop goal was worth 4 points and a try only 3 points. This points allocation was a sort of fossil from the days when rugby was more football/rugby than the rugby/football the game has morphed into.
The laws of rugby have become modernised to recognise the fact that rugby is now not only a sport but a commercial entertainment. Spectators want to see tries. They don’t want to see drop goals, as the booing from Australian and New Zealand fans indicates when a player shapes up to kick one.
The exception to this, of course, is in South Africa and especially in the heartland of the Afrikaner spirit, Loftus Versfeld stadium. The home crowd were ecstatic when Steyn did his thing, as calm in his kicking, penalties and drop goals, as a surgeon.
There is a case, I believe, for the modernisation of the points system to be pushed further towards the rugby league system of the one-point drop goal.
Even under this system, the Springboks would have won the Test at Loftus Versfeld but the scoreline would have been much closer in the last minutes.
This factor, in turn, might have concentrated the minds of the Wallabies enough to score a winning try which looked on offer on many occasions throughout the Test. But silly mistakes stopped the flow of plays that had try potential.
For the first 20 minutes, as with so many Tests this season, the Wallabies looked assured, confident, and skilful. But this initial and confident series of attacks petered out and it became hard to see what sort of pattern of play the Wallabies were trying to use.
Is there a fitness issue here? Or is it a combination of a lack of fitness and a mental strength to keep going?
The disappointing aspect of the Test, in fact, was that the Wallabies should really have won comfortably at a stadium where they have not won a single Test now in seven starts.
The ease of their first and only try for either side vindicates this assertion. A pop-up pass to Scott Sio and the bulky prop was able to stroll through a gap in the Springboks defensive line as if he were on a training drill.
Michael Cheika was right after the match to make the point that the Wallabies were “in” the Test but never “in control.” The problem was identified correctly, too: “We lacked consistent quality… If we had taken our points down there, we win the game.”
This question has to asked, therefore: Why didn’t the Wallabies take their points when they were in point-scoring situations?
The back line arrangement is still not right.
The Will Genia-Quade Cooper halves combination is worth keeping. This would mean dropping Bernard Foley or keeping him and dropping Cooper. If Cooper is kept, then he has to do the goal-kicking, except for the extra long range kick-and-hope shots that Reece Hodge can attempt.
But I would bring Samu Kerevi and Reece Hodge into the centres.
Dane Haylett-Petty, who was once again one of the better Wallabies backs, needs to be shifted to fullback and Israel Folau moved to the wing.
The deterioration in Folau’s form this season has affected the Waratahs and the Wallabies and it is now becoming a serious problem for Cheika to deal with. I have never rated Folau as a world-class rugby player. Compare his play, for instance, with that of Ben Smith.
It is clear who the more effective player is – Smith, with his range of skills and his ability to come into attacks to make the fatal strikes by a mile. It is rather like the old David Pocock/Richie McCaw argument, with McCaw, like Smith, winning hands down with his range of skills that enabled him to affect the outcome of Tests in so many different ways.
Admittedly Bryan Habana milked the yellow card given against Folau. But the Wallabies fullback showed ineptness in the way he turned his shoulder towards Habana, allowing the Springboks winger to run into it.
The other point to be made here goes to whether Stephen Larkham is an effective attack coach. The Wallabies backs are still too deep. They don’t make the right choices all the time. Too often, as well, there are careless plays like unnecessary forward passes that kill off movements that have promising potential in them.
The balance of the forwards is not quite right, too. The second row remains a puzzle. And when Cheika brought on his prop reserves the Wallaby scrum that had held the upper hand came under pressure that forced the team on to the back foot just when they needed to push on to a victory.
As an aside, I can’t understand why the Wallabies props and hookers are routinely, like clockwork in fact, brought off the field, even though they are still playing well, when there is enough time left in the Test for it to be lost or won.
There doesn’t seem to be the method in the Wallabies attacks that, say, the All Blacks, especially in their first half five-try onslaught against the Pumas, have revealed in Test after Test this season. The Waratahs when they won the Super Rugby tournament had the ensemble/pressure game under control. The Wallabies are a good way off this sort of clarity of method right now.
The two The Rugby Championship Tests over the weekend revealed that the All Blacks passing style, rugby as basketball, is the future of rugby and needs to be mastered by teams like the Wallabies (and the Springboks) if they have the ambition to be the top team in world rugby.
The Springboks showed, too, that the old-fashioned attritional kicking game can work, if most of the kicks are converted and if the opposition (the Wallabies in this case) muff up their chances of scoring tries.
But I would add a caveat to this. The Springboks game doesn’t work out of South Africa. And on the evidence of this year alone, when Ireland with 14 players for most of the Test defeated them in South Africa for the first time ever, it is a perilous way of winning Tests.
Next week’s Test against the All Blacks, who will launch their A-team rather than five of their back-up players (one of whom, though, Anton Lienart-Brown, has come through to be a starter) against the Springboks should provide an interesting insight into the effectiveness of rugby/basketball over rugby/football.
I thought before the Test at Loftus Versfeld that the Wallabies had a good chance of winning. To be honest, they blew a Test they should have won. The result is a setback for the Wallabies. But it is not a devastating one. They were not blown away as they were against the All Blacks, in two Tests.
The Test next week against the Pumas, a side the Wallabies tend to play well against, will be another test of whether Cheika is improving the side with his selections (changes are still needed again in the second row perhaps?) and his methods of attack and defence.
You would think that the Wallabies need to win to get any momentum going into a final Test at Eden Park and then the Grand Slam onslaught in November.
As an indication, though, of how few players Cheika has brought through to their best this year and how many have lost form, I offer Paul Cully’s Team of the Week in Monday’s The Sydney Morning Herald:
Scott Sio (Australia), Adrian Strauss (South Africa), Owen Franks (NZ), Patrick Tuipulotu (NZ), Brodie Retallick (NZ), Oupa Mohoje (SA),Francois Louw (SA), Facundo Isa (Argentina): T J Perenara (NZ), Beauden Barrett (NZ), Ryan Crotty (NZ), Anton Lienart-Brown (NZ), Francois Hougaard (SA), Israel Dagg (NZ), Ben Smith (NZ).
A solitary Wallaby and one whose form this season has been below par. Four Springboks. One Puma, perhaps lucky to be selected ahead of Keiran Read. And nine All Blacks, six of them backs.
Who would have thought at the beginning of the season that the Israel in a Team of the Week would have been a Dagg and not a Folau?