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Who said rugby was finished in Australia? A ground record crowd of 56,771 at Etihad Stadium in Melbourne saw the Wallabies save their chance of winning the series against the British and Irish Lions with a gutsy win that was almost lost right on time.
For all the right sort of reasons, this was one of the great Wallaby wins – and just one of only six victories over a Lions side.
This was Test rugby at its most brutal, ferocious and gutsy.
For most of the match the occasion was almost too much for both sides as they made handling, passing, lineout and scrum errors. But all the fumbling and bumbling, the mistakes, the missed opportunities and the stupid plays were forgotten with the drama of the closing minutes.
Those last 10 minutes of the match involved such intense, gut-wrenching drama that your reporter, who invariably is the model of decorum and impartiality in the press box, jumped to his feet and punched the air in triumph when Leigh Halfpenny missed his final shot at goal with time up.
The British journalists seated around your reporter who were yelling triumphantly throughout most of the Test were crumpled in their seats, rather in the mode of exhausted balloons.
With the score 15-9 to the Lions, and with only eight minutes of play remaining, Wallaby skipper James Horwill made one of the bravest and most important captain’s calls in the history of Australian rugby when the Wallabies were awarded a penalty, after a long series of attacks, right in front of the Lions’ posts.
If the Wallabies slotted the goal, they would still have to score a try to win. But they then had the option to kick another penalty or drop goal and tie the match. This would have meant tying the series with a win at Sydney or losing the match if a penalty or try couldn’t be scored within minutes of a Lions kick-off.
Horwill had no hesitation in asking for a scrum. The Wallabies got the ball out to James O’Connor who took the ball to the line, and only metres away from the Lions try line.
When he ran into contact, O’Connor fired a no-look pass to Israel Folau who knocked on as he came into the attack on the burst, another slightly mistimed attack.
True confessions time forces me to acknowledge that I thought the Wallabies had thrown away the game right then and there. And the additional thought came to me that the critics may well be right that O’Connor is not a natural five-eighth.
Throughout the Test he had been standing deep and had been slowish in passing off to his outside backs when attacks were being launched.
An email from a friend who knows a lot about rugby suggested that Quade Cooper will be brought back into the Wallaby side for Sydney to give the team some attacking flair. I suggested back to him that this would not happen.
My guess is that Robbie Deans will stay with O’Connor as main playmaker, with the support from time to time of Christian Lealiifano.
My preference would be for Lealiifano and O’Connor to swap positions. Lealiifano is more of a natural passer of the ball than O’Connor. O’Connor does have the ability to hold a defensive line from drifting, which is a special talent for an inside back, as his play in setting up Adam Ashley-Cooper for the decisive and only try of the Test suggests.
Back to the action. The Wallabies came back from a lineout near halfway to set up yet another series of attacks which – finally – saw Ashley-Cooper fly across for a try.
The try was scored relatively wide out, which meant that Lealiifano had a difficult conversion to make. He took the ball right back to the 22 metre line to widen up the angle a bit. This was a brave decision taken by the kicker, as it lengthened his kick slightly.
The media box was on the other side of the field from the kicker. But a fraction of a second after the ball left his boot and still nowhere near the posts a huge, surging roar of “Yeeeesssss!!!”, like a smashing hit of sound, resonated throughout the enclosed ground.
A lot was made of Folau’s Test match debut at Brisbane, but in its own way Lealiifano’s Test debut at Melbourne (which discounts the seconds he was on the field at Brisbane) was perhaps the more impressive of the two.
Lealiifano converted all his kicks, with several of them being on difficult angles. His general play, too, was sound. And his defensive work was strong with the Lions centres and wingers trying to smash through his channel without much success.
I would say that Lealiifano is a long-term Wallaby (barring injuries) and, as I have argued earlier, destined to be the Wallaby number 10 with O’Connor being used in the future (but not at Sydney) as more of a running threat.
Having put themselves into the winning position, the Wallabies then contrived to put themselves into the situation where they could lose the game.
O’Connor, who was guilty of not kicking for touch when he should have earlier in the match, now decided to kick the ball out. The problem was that the ball had been taken back into the Wallaby 22 from the kick-off.
The Lions, without their captain Sam Warburton who had pinched a number of turnovers, now contrived to do their own panicking.
A lineout was lost, wonderfully caugh by Liam Gill. The Wallabies then won a penalty and with time almost up the Wallabies had possession of the ball and were content to drive one-up plays.
The problem with this time-wasting play is that referees hate it. It is almost impossible, too, to do the drives without someone falling over the tackled player or one of the forwards getting in the way of a defender, which is what happened.
The Lions ran the ball from their penalty. The attacks were stopped, continued, stopped and a slow, grinding progress was made up the field amid the most incredible wall of sound one could ever expect to hear. Then a metre or so inside the Wallaby half, and about 20 metres from touch, the Wallabies were penalised!
Awful thoughts of the reverse of Brisbane was going to take place. The Wallabies then snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, were the Lions going to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat?
The tension was unbearable. Even journalists around me could hardly bring themselves to watch as deadly Leigh Halfpenny lined up for the final play of what had became a memorable Test.
Like an old con-man, Halfpenny couldn’t resist placing his kicking tee a metre or so closer to the posts than on the proper spot.
Craig Joubert, who handled a difficult match with accuracy and understanding of the tensions of the match (I listened to the referee’s mike radio), moved the tee back to the spot.
I must say that Halfpenny looked completely done in. His kick never looked like getting anywhere near the posts. Will Genia caught it and in high spirits booted the ball to the “shit-house,” to use Bob Dwyer’s famous phrase.
Throughout the match the Lions played very cynically. They moved extremely slowly into their lineouts, despite many warnings from Joubert.
They contrived to send players down after virtually every phase of play. At one point Horwill complained to Joubert about this.
“The stoppages are never-ending,” he called out to Joubert in exasperation. Joubert admitted the problem but could do nothing about it as the Lions did it expertly sending down several players, almost always a prop or a hooker as one of the ‘injured’, to ensure that play stopped.
This stop-start feature of the game helped the Lions who looked sluggish and tired for most of the fixture. It also rattled the Wallabies, who were under pressure to win the match. They looked a bit panicky as time ticked away and they were six points down.
The other major complaint about the Lions’ play was the cynical way they used the scrum (as Wales also has done with Warren Gatland as coach) as a means of forcing penalties rather than starting the game.
Initially this worked against the Lions as the Wallabies won a couple of scrum penalties. But as the Test progressed, the Lions turned this around and the penalties flowed their way from scrums.
I wonder if referees have forgotten that use-it or lose-it applies to scrums as it does to mauls. If the Lions want to hold the ball in the back of the scrum, they should be penalised with a short-arm infringement if no penalty is given and the scrum collapsed. Hopefully this point will be made to the French referee for the Sydney Test.
There were too many occasions at Brisbane and Melbourne where the Lions held the ball in the scrum, did not win the penalty but got the re-feed when the scrum collapsed.
Before and during the match, the Lions supporters (the best supporters in the world) were in roaring, confident mood. At times the roaring sweeping through the streets of wonderful Melbourne were like choruses of banshees on a war charge as they made their way to Etihad Stadium. There was no respite during the Test, either.
In a few moments of quiet before the Test, I asked Sir Clive Woodward how he viewed the match. He told me that he thought the fact that the Wallabies had to win to stay alive in the series could give them the psychological edge.
And this proved to be correct. At the end of the Test, when the series was on the line, and possibly the careers of the coach and a number of the senior players, it was the Wallabies who had the physical and mental resilience, the guts, to throw everything into attacks to score their winning try.
No Lions seemed to follow up Halfpenny’s kick, which might have been chased down because it fell so short. It was as if they were prepared to win by kicks, or lose by kicks.
This sense of deflation was passed on somehow to the Lions supporters. Where only a minute or so ago they were roaring Lions supporters, they were now more lambs than lions.
Making my way back to our hotel I was struck by how silent these lambs were. My wife, who was dining with some friends, knew from this silence, the silence of the lambs, that the Lions had lost.
Do they and their supporters, though, have one last roar for Sydney?