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Robbie Deans gets Wallabies squad right (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)
The fact about Robbie Deans and the Wallabies challenge to win the 2011 RWC is that his team made the semi-finals of the tournament, a placing that the ARU had allocated as a ‘pass mark’ before the tournament began.
An additional fact is that some months before the RWC tournament, Deans was given an extension to his contract, giving him charge of the Wallabies until the end of the 2013 season, the year of the British and Irish Lions tour of Australia.
The argument that is raging right now in the Australian rugby community is whether Deans’ record from 2008 through to the 2011 RWC tournament is strong enough to justify the extension of his contract.
His opponents argue that he should fall on his sword, and that his lacklustre record as the coach of the Wallabies suggests he should make way for his obvious successor, Ewen McKenzie.
I may as well nail my colours to the mast right away. I am a supporter of Deans.
In my opinion, Deans has been a successful coach of the Wallabies. He should and, indeed, must stay on.
I would also argue that, if possible, he should guide the team he is creating to the 2015 RWC tournament in England with the object of winning Australia’s third World Cup.
Before objectors start fulminating about the perceived arrogance of all of this, I would ask them to consider a little rugby history.
The decline of the Wallabies in the professional era started when a group of bloshie players (most of them but not exclusively from the Brumbies franchise) decided to force out Rod Macqueen, the Wallabies’ most successful coach.
The bolshies made Macqueen’s life as a coach so unpleasant with their continual mocking and defiance that he quit as Wallabies coach after he coached the team to Australia’s first series victory against the Lions.
He was sick and tired of the player power nonsense.
He is a successful businessman, and as he told me when he became the Wallabies coach: ‘I can pull out whenever I want to because I’m not dependent on coaching for my income.’
Macqueen was supposed to retire after the Tri Nations tournament. But he’d had enough and he left the team to his heir apparent, Eddie Jones.
Jones got the Wallabies into the final of RWC 2003. But the longer he was coach, the worse the Wallabies became. Or more accurately, the less the influence and coaching of Macqueen was available to the Wallabies, the more robotic, predictable and easy to defeat the team became.
John Connelly replaced Jones, and Queensland rugby finally had its dream of a Queenslander in total control of the Wallabies. Connelly kept the bolshies, indeed he was subservient to them.
The end result was the exit of the Wallabies in RWC 2007 in the quarter-finals to a poor England side.
This was the second time Australia did not make the semi-finals in a RWC tournament.
The reaction to all of this by the chief executive of the ARU, John O’Neill, was to head-hunt Deans, who was regarded by many (most?) experts as the best coach in the world at the time.
Deans had won the Super Rugby title five times with the Canterbury Crusaders. He was the rugby equivalent of the NRL master coach, Wayne Bennett.
There are two important considerations to note at this stage in the saga.
First, the bolshies never accepted the legitimacy of the Deans appointment. Their master plan is to get rid of John O’Neill, who they see as the gate-keeper preventing them from gaining control of Australian rugby.
Deans, as an O’Neill appointment, was denigrated from the beginning of his tenure. They cast aspersions on his commitment to the Wallaby cause. They questioned his integrity.
All this hostility was summed up in the disgraceful nickname they heaped on Deans: ‘Dingo’, as they frequently referred to him.
For his part, Deans saw that the only way to rescue the Wallabies from their 2007 nadir (with the team ranked 5th in the world) was to get rid of all the remaining bolshies in the side.
This process took nearly three years.
One bolshie, Matt Giteau, remained in 2011. He was given a final chance against Samoa. He failed and he was dropped.
At the very time Deans was defending Quade Cooper in a media conference in Auckland, Giteau was twittering that the Wallaby coach should be sacked because he did not know how to encourage his players to play well for him and the team.
As well as getting rid of the bolshies, Deans had to change the style of the Wallabies so that they had the skills to play “what was in front of them” rather than the robotic game that Jones and Connelly insisted on the Wallabies playing.
This meant finding and developing a group of young players and encouraging them to play with spirit and enterprise.
Will Genia was promoted to the Wallabies after only a handful of games for the Queensland Reds. Cooper, Kurtley Beale, James O’Connor and David Pocock were pushed ahead of players more senior to them.
The result is that the current Wallaby squad has about 10 players around or under the age of 23. These players are among the stars of the side, too.
Going into the RWC 2011 tournament, the Wallabies were the number 2 ranked side in the world. They had won Tests against a full-strength Springboks side in South Africa and a full-strength All Blacks side at Brisbane.
The first 40 minutes of the Brisbane Test, when the All Blacks were almost blasted out of the game, were described by Nick Farr-Jones as the best 40 minutes a Wallaby side had played for over a decade.
The consensus within the Australian rugby community (and this included all the bolshies who are now media commentators) was that the Wallabies were primed to give RWC 2011 a good shake.
Winning the tournament was talked about as a distinct possibility.
We now know that all this was not to be.
The Wallabies ran into an ambush in the rain against Ireland. The scrum let the side down. The side re-grouped but was faced with the virtually impossible task of defeating the Springboks in the quarter-final, the All Blacks in the semi, and whoever (if these two victories could be achieved) in the final.
South African supporters (to no one’s surprise) described the Wallabies victory against their team as an impossibility that was only achieved by a New Zealand referee Bryce Lawrence conniving to bring the Boks down. It is a shameful fact that this nonsense has been given traction by a senior figure in South African refereeing and administration, Andre Watson.
Watson’s support of the campaign against Lawrence should see him banned from any involvement with the IRB and SANZAR. I could go on about how he is the last person in the refereeing world to cast aspersions on the integrity of a fellow referee but I will leave the statement there …
I was at the Australia-South Africa quarter-final.
Although the Springboks had all the territory and the possession, it always seemed likely that the Wallabies would win the game. This is not because of any alleged help from Lawrence, but because they were far more positive with the scraps of possession they had.
The Springboks arrogantly believed they could take the incessant kicking, non-rugby game that won them the RWC 2007 tournament into RWC 2011, even though the IRB had stated repeatedly that this was not the sort of play the laws of the game were intended to reward.
This victory by the Wallabies was hailed by former players (again Nick Farr-Jones was prominent in his praise) as the greatest defensive effort an Australian side had ever put up.
Going into the semi-final, there was an expectation in Australia and in New Zealand that the Wallabies had the game to defeat the All Blacks.
The tension in New Zealand before and during the match was testament to the fact that All Black supporters did not accept the notion that Deans had failed as a coach to produce a threatening Wallaby side.
Hindsight tells us the Wallabies were disappointing against the All Blacks.
They missed Kurtley Beale’s attacks from the back, and his safe play under the high ball. Quade Cooper played below his capabilities. The scrum went to pieces.
The All Blacks took David Pocock out of the rucks and mauls by running at him. They dominated the break down.
The Wallabies could not release their dangerous backs. Will Genia adopted Queensland Reds tactics of kicking box kicks. And so on …
Fred Allen, the grand old man of New Zealand, an All Black captain in the 1940s and a coach who never lost a Test, reckons that the All Blacks played one of their greatest matches ever.
We will be in as better position to judge how well or how poorly the Wallabies played around 11 pm (New Zealand time) on Sunday night.
But being there at the ground was an experience in crowd power, in support of the All Blacks, I have never experienced for any other side anywhere in the world.
Deans has restored the credibility and integrity of the Wallabies (and their world rankings). He has a team that is on the up. He should be allowed to go as high as he can go with the young players he has mentored and developed.
As George Gregan said in another context: “Four more years.”
