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Australia Wallabies players celebrate after they defeated New Zealand All Blacks in the DHL Hong Kong Bledisloe Cup rugby match in Hong Kong Saturday, Oct. 30, 2010. Australia won 26-24. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)
The Hong Kong Bledilsoe Cup Test (surely the last for many years) was an enthralling match which could have had several different outcomes, other than the 26 Australia – 24 New Zealand result.
The Wallabies could have won with a cricket score.
They piled 12 points on the board, early on in the Test. Then missed four penalties, admittedly the ones taken by Kurtley Beale were from a long way out. As well, they bombed several tries in this period. One of them, a breakout by Beale (who was sensational once again at fullback) which the All Blacks somehow smothered and then snuffed out.
A try then and the All Blacks were gone.
They were being penalised by the referee Alain Rolland at scrum time, even though their scrum was dominant. They were making elementary handling mistakes. Their lineout, once again under the coaching of Steve Hansen, was a shambles.
But the Wallabies did not put the All Blacks away and after about 25 minutes they slowly and surely began to smash through the weak (especially Quade Cooper and Mark Chisholm) Wallaby defence. Before and after halftime they piled on 24 unanswered points.
A 40-point All Blacks scoreline was on the cards.
Then with the score line 24 – 12 and about 20 minutes of play left, Graham Henry pulled off Daniel Carter. Carter was playing within himself. He had tried only once to take the line on. But he seemed to have plenty of gas left in his tank. On came Stephen Donald to lose the game for the All Blacks.
There is a curious thing about coaches in that they have favourite players, even when these players fail to deliver. Donald is one of those players for Henry, as is Iaisa Toeava. Both these players made fateful mistakes which allowed the Wallabies to come back and score the two converted tries they needed to win the Test.
Toeava slipped over after misreading a brilliant back movement, which involved a spot-on long cut-out pass from Cooper and a number of runners off the ball. Once again Mils Miliaiana was out of position (he, too, surely can’t be retained in the starting XV next year?) and Drew Mitchell finished off in grand fashion.
Then Donald put in his ludicrous grubber kicks inside his own 22, missed a kickable penalty, and then kicked for distance rather than deep for touch with 79 minutes and 39 seconds on the clock! Richard Loe was right in the NZ Herald when he said all four number 10s in the ITM semi-finals in New Zealand (three of them teenagers and Slade) are better players right now than Donald.
While all this was happening, with the Wallabies storming back into the Test with Mitchell’s try, the All Blacks once again showed they have no idea (other than trying to score a try) on closing out games.
They were leading by 5 points with about six minutes to go when they moved the ball in a series of crunching runs from lineout drives from their own half to metres away from the Wallaby tryline.
Why didn’t they set up a drop goal? This would have closed out the Test and if it missed they would have got the ball back for another, and another, attempt.
If they had to lose a Test, this was a good Test for the All Blacks to lose.
They got the ‘peaking too soon’ monkey off their backs. If the selectors are smart they will know that next year the failed players in the backline will have to be discarded for the brilliant young talent. This is a big ‘if’, of course.
For the Wallabies, there was the satisfaction of actually finishing off a Test strongly and winning it by scoring more points in the second half than the All Blacks. This is only the third Test out of 83 the All Blacks have lost after being in front at halftime. The Test before was the semi-final at Cardiff in RWC 2007 when the drop kick option was left until it was too late.
The Wallabies have entrenched their position as number 2 side in world rugby, with justifiable pretensions for the number 1 position.
Robbie Deans is no longer under any pressure (in my view he never really was) to ‘get results’ while he was trying to build up a squad from the rubble of RWC 2007 and with a group of players, especially in the tight five, who aside from Benn Robinson, are not quality Test players.
So the scrum remains a worry.
The try Mitchell scored came from a Wallaby scrum that was re-set three times. Will another referee be as tolerant to the Wallaby scrumming problems as Rolland was on this occasion?
The lineout, too, disintegrated during the match to the extent that near the end of the Test the Wallabies opted to tap a penalty outside the All Blacks 22 rather than kick for a lineout near their tryline.
There has been talk about some of the injured players automatically coming back into the Wallaby pack next season. James Horwill will, probably.
But forget about Wycliff Palu. Ben McCalman is the find of the season. He reminds me a lot of Tim Gavin, of blessed memory.
With Rocky Elsom coming back into form and David Pocock’s fearless digging for turnovers, the Wallabies have a terrific back row, one that matches almost the All Blacks and the Springboks.
The small backline was brilliant on attack. It is not often you see two tries from about 50m out directly from scrums.
Cooper is a bit like a honey pot for defenders. They swarm all over him trying to shut down his tricks. But this leaves gaps for his outside backs when they run on to his pin-point passes. If the defenders try to cover the other runners Cooper has the speed to cut through as he did to score his try.
James O’Connor announced himself as the new Shane Williams. He is smallish and muscular. His defence is strong. And his broken field running makes him very dangerous when he gets mismatches.
Somehow on defence, Deans has to put in a system that puts O’Connor into Cooper’s position because the number 10 channel is virtually a sea-way for attackers to flood through. Of course, Cooper could learn how to tackle. But there has been no improvement this season even when this weakness in his play has been identified.
With his two conversions at the death, which effectively won the match, O’Connor showed that he rather than Matt Giteau should be the starting goal-kicker.
The position of Giteau, in fact, deserves some attention from Deans. It may be that if Berrick Barnes can get his Donald-like mania for kicking away possession out of his game, he is the best five-eighths partner to Cooper.
Having started the tour with a flourish, the Wallabies now have to show that they can put a series of Test wins together.
They have Wales on Saturday night. Will we see (as I expect) the new Wallabies putting together another strong performance? Or will we see … but let’s not go there while the euphoria of Hong Kong still remains a strong memory.