Wallabies miss chance to beat All Blacks, again

New Zealand’s Dan Carter, right, is tackled by Australia’s Nathan Sharpe during the Bledisloe Cup rugby match in Sydney, Australia, Saturday, Aug. 22, 2009. New Zealand won the match 19-18 and retain the Bledisloe Cup.(AP Photo/Rob Griffith)

Why oh why didn’t Matt Giteau call for a drop goal in the last minutes of the thrilling Bledisloe Cup Test at Sydney’s ANZ Stadium? Giteau was so close to the All Blacks posts he could have thrown the ball over the bar.

Instead the Wallabies banged away to score a try. Ben Alexander dropped the ball and yet again the Wallabies missed their chance to beat the All Blacks.

Robbie Deans came in as the Wallaby coach with the mantra that the players had to learn to play ‘what is in front of them.’ If any situation called for a WIIFOT play, this was it.

The Wallabies were 18 – 19 down, time was up, the Wallabies were surging forward towards the posts, the All Blacks had to be careful not to give away a penalty and Giteau is a drop goal master.

Poor decision-making is probably the answer to the opening question.

The Wallabies were exhausted and their weary bodies had clogged up the thinking processes. An inexperienced halfback, Will Genia, also did not help matters. But someone surely should have shouted out a drop goal call.

The Wallabies can have no complaints about the referee, Jonathan Kaplan, a 53-Test veteran.

Kaplan was even-handed and tough on both sides slowing down the ball illegally. The result was a Test with a tremendous amount of ball movement, fierce counter-rucking, ferocious and accurate tackling and moments of almost unbearable intensity.

The huge crowd shouted for their side with a passion that seemed like an English football crowd.

As the All Blacks mounted their surge in the last 20 minutes, their supporters started a chant of ‘All Blacks! All Blacks!’ which was challenged by stronger chants of ‘Wall-a-bies! Wall-a-bies!.’

When Daniel Carter took his fateful kick for goal to give the All Blacks their final winning margin, there was a sound resounding around the stadium that seemed to me to be a surging wind storm.

How the Man of the Match award was given to Nathan Sharpe defies my understanding.

The Wallaby front five were out-played by the All Blacks front five, especially in the second half when the All Blacks had about 70 per cent of possession and position.

His opposite, Isaac Ross, out-played Sharpe in the lineouts, at the rucks and mauls and in general play. It was his tackle on the Wallaby goal-line that forced the crucial ruck where the final penalty was conceded.

This tolerance, indeed praise, of inadequate play by Sharpe has not helped the Wallabies. The same criticism applies to the continuing endorsement of Al Baxter. Deans gave the prop the hook about 30 minutes into the Test when after a series of collapsed scrums, on his side, he gave away a free kick from a Wallaby feed.

Baxter had a thunderous look on his face as he made his way to the bench. Presumably he has played his last Test as a starter.

Another player who gets a lot of praise but rarely delivers in the big Tests is Giteau.

Carter showed how a world class five-eights can turn the fortunes of his side.

Towards the end of the Test Carter started to play as a loose forward. He charged into rucks, competed for the ball in the mauls, made tackles, breaks and then had the cool-eyed vision to put through the killer kick to the Wallaby try-line.

Carter came more and more into the Test as it became increasingly important for someone in the All Blacks to do something to pull off the victory. Giteau, on the other hand, disappeared the more the Test reached its climax.

In my view, the time is overdue for Berrick Barnes to be promoted to the five-eights position and for Giteau to be placed on the wing or fullback, possibly at inside centre, his preferred position.

Giteau’s real value to the Wallabies comes from his broken field running. His kicking and passing skills, though, seem to disappear when the going gets really tough.

When Barnes was on the field in the first half, the Wallabies established the handy lead of 12 – 3. Barnes orchestrated a series of back line attacks that had the All Blacks scrambling in their defence. They were caught out of position and had to give up penalties in their efforts to slow down the Wallabies onslaught.

With Barnes out injured for the entire second half (with a bang to the head apparently), the Wallabies looked directionless.

They relied too much on one-man charges and break-outs. The fluency and patterns of the first half were gone, and so were the constant pressures on the All Blacks defensive line.

From an objective point of view, taking away the feelings of frustrated Wallaby supporters who found it hard to endure yet another defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, this was a tremendously exciting Test match.

I was surprised to read, therefore, in The Sunday Telegraph, the rugby league writer James Hooper writing his colour story on the Test with its headline: ‘Boredom rules at Bledisloe.’

Hooper had all the rugby league chip-on-the-shoulder cliches. The 80,228 spectators, virtually a full house, were the ‘rah-rah brigade,’ for instance. His version of the Test had little resemblance to the reality of the match and was at variance with the report of the paper’s rugby writer, Iain Payten.

I’ve often complained about rugby league-obsessed editors who see it as their duty to denigrate the other football codes in the bizarre belief that if they bag the opposition code enough rugby league will somehow burst out of its stronghold ghetto of the eastern seaboard of Australia and a couple of counties in England.

One of the cliches that Hooper did not raise was the assertion that rugby union players can’t tackle as effectively as rugby league players.

Even he, presumably has seen the light on this after the disastrous defensive play of league/union players like Wendell Sailor and Timana Tahu, in particular.

The defence by both sides in this Test was massive. Not one tackle was cheap-shot shoulder charge or head-high hit.

If Hooper wants some sort of comparison of how hard and ferocious the play (he didn’t apparently see) was, he should consult Brad Thorn, a rugby league giant and now a powerhouse All Blacks second rower.

After the Test, Thorn admitted he was a ‘walking carcass.’ He said the physical toll of the Test was like no other match he’d played.

This from a star of State of Origin matches, NRL finals and Kangaroos Tests.

‘For me, for some reason,’ he told reporters on Saturday night, ‘I am really knackered.’

The All Blacks were mentally and physically tougher than the Wallabies on Saturday night. They have now given themselves a chance of retaining the Tri-Nations trophy, while retaining the Bledisloe Cup, by winning a Test out of New Zealand.

The Wallabies now have to look to defeat the all-conquering Springboks at Perth. A tall order.

I heard the former All Blacks second rower and now television expert Ian Jones tell a mate that both the All Blacks and the Wallabies were ‘a long way short of the Springboks in South Africa.’

Can the Springboks take their form out of Africa?

Can the Wallabies play out a Test for the full 80 minutes? Will this be enough, anyway, for the Wallabies to defeat one of the great Springboks sides.