Justice for Jesse Mogg!

Let this be clear as mud – I do not think Jesse Mogg should be playing fullback for the Wallabies.

His defence against linebreaks is very suspect, his situational awareness as a fullback is off, he tends to bite off more than he can chew with his kicks for touch, and he has the unfortunate tendency to occasionally turn in an absolutely dreadful performance.

And yet I cannot find myself agreeing with the populist line of criticism of his play that has come out after the match. A lot of the criticism is unfair, unbalanced, or simply ignoring any evidence to the contrary.

As a matter of fact, if he could have come off at the same time as Matt Toomua, I think we should have been talking about a very reasonable performance.

So again I find myself going in to bat for a fellow that I think should be benched, and not because I think he proved me wrong with his performance, but because I think he is not being given a fair hearing.

Let’s start off with the accusation that his kicking has been poor.

Tosh. He may not have had a perfect game, but to be honest, I think he more than earned a pass on this score.

Nothing irritates Australian rugby fans more than ‘pointless kicking’, so it can be very difficult to convince them that kicking can sometimes be purposeful and useful.

Let’s have a look at Mogg’s up-and-unders.

He kicked three in the first half of the match. Of those, the Wallabies regained possession from the first and the third, and could have regained possession off the second if the pack hadn’t been dragging their heels.

Consider the first example. In the fourth minute of the match Mogg put up an up-and-under for Israel Dagg who caught the ball and was tackled by Mogg the second he landed back on the turf.

Mogg actually twisted the tackle around, presenting Dagg and the ball to the oncoming Wallaby pack.

This enabled the chasers in Michael Hooper, Rob Simmons, Ben Alexander, Christian Leali’ifano, James Horwill and Adam Ashley-Cooper to steamroll over the top and win a turnover.

One might question why the centres were required to go into the ruck in the absence of Ben Mowen, Scott Fardy, and Stephen Moore (later discovered to be seagulling in the back line), but that is completely beside the point.

Mogg was playing to a plan and he executed his part of it to perfection.

Don’t believe that it was planned? Well, he must have gotten very lucky again less than ten minutes later, because the up-and-under to Dagg, the chase, the tackle, and the twist were all the same mechanics as used before.

I actually had to check that I hadn’t rewinded by mistake.

And it should have worked again.

However, as I mentioned earlier, on this occasion the forward pack was too slow to get to the ruck. The All Blacks – having learned their lesson – drove over the top before the Wallaby pack could get near. Opportunity wasted.

In the third instance, Mogg fouled up. He jagged the kick sidewards and it looked destined to go out on the full and come all the way back for the lineout.

But Mogg had been doing a very good job of chasing his own kicks. He recognised that the ball was going to go out so he sprinted to get to where it was coming down, and leapt over the touchline to smack it back to Hooper.

It didn’t make the kick look any better, but it was a very good recovery to get valuable possession for the Wallabies for which he has so far received zero credit.

He also hasn’t gotten much credit for the fact that he outgunned Israel Dagg in the only conclusive kicking duel of the match.

While there was plenty of aerial ping-pong in the match to not want to speak of, there was an interesting exchange in the 55th minute between Mogg, Dagg, Mogg again, and finally Julian Savea that ended up gaining the Wallabies a good fifty metres of real estate.

Mogg’s second kick actually found touch well inside the All Blacks 22m line for a gain in territory of nearly eighty metres. Dagg had no choice but to take the quick throw in to Savea or the All Blacks would have had a defending lineout ten metres out from their own line.

Whether you feel that Mogg should have been trying to link up with Israel Folau or James O’Connor to counterattack (as one irritated Kiwi commentator on Sky Sports did) is irrelevant.

Counterattacking can’t have been a part of Ewen McKenzie’s menu for the night or we would have seen more of it.

What Mogg did was the job that he was clearly assigned to carry out as part of the Wallabies broader strategy – outkick the other guy. The tactics might not have made sense, but the execution was good.

The execution was not so good on the kick in the 65th minute when Mogg failed to find touch off a long arm penalty. Three minutes later he put a kick out on the full to compound the impression that he’d had a poor night with the boot.

But the reality is that if anything it was a bit of a mixed bag for Mogg. He kicked well while the Wallabies were competitive, but as the Wallabies started to tire and fall behind on the scoreboard, he tried to help out by stealing a few extra metres.

It didn’t work, but how can you criticise him for it? The Wallabies were behind and his ambitions were completely understandable.

So what I’m saying is that up until that point in the match, he had only really committed one bad mistake that he couldn’t make up for– his miss on Steve Luatua. There aren’t any excuses to make for it – it was a one-on-one and he barely laid a finger on Luatua.

O’Connor had to come across and save his blushes by making the tackle.

But that does not make Mogg responsible for the try that occurred shortly thereafter. As soon as Luatua had gotten through the gap between Alexander and Fardy, the All Blacks were going to score.

The Wallabies defence just couldn’t scramble back fast enough, and the All Blacks turned quick ball into a two-men overlap on Ben Smith’s wing that neither of the Wallabies’ defenders (Leali’ifano and Mogg) had any hope of keeping out.

‘Mogg still should have made the tackle’, I hear you say. And I agree. As I said at the top of the page and in comments in many other rugby articles: I think Mogg’s defence against linebreaks is very weak.

But that doesn’t make it fair to blame the try on him. If anyone, blame Alexander for slipping off the first tackle in the first place. It is much easier to defend in the phalanx with teammates on either side of you than it is to defend the acres of open space that lies beyond.

Jesse Mogg isn’t much chop at the latter, but neither was Quade Cooper. McKenzie has now insisted (much to my relief) that Cooper defends in the front line, and since then, Cooper’s weak one-on-one tackling has become a non-issue and in fact has ameliorated noticeably.

We could do the same thing with Mogg if he were selected as a winger instead of a fullback.

Personally, I don’t know if it is worth it, but if it meant that he could position himself at the back for dealing with kicking duties while fielding on the wing when the runners come knocking, you could potentially get the best of his strengths while mitigating his weaknesses.

In any case, I digress. The subject at hand relates to his performance on the weekend, and to be honest, his defence was actually not that bad. Sure he did nothing to stop Luatua, but he didn’t disgrace himself elsewhere.

In fact, his tackle on Aaron Smith who had made a linebreak in the 63rd minute resulted in a forward pass and the consequent scrum-feed for the Wallabies.

Not bad for a fellow who ‘couldn’t stop a wet rag from scoring’.

I am not bringing this argument to you as a case for retaining Mogg for another week (although I think it could do that). I would just prefer for people to consider all of the data – for and against – before they go and make completely prejudiced generalisations that don’t wash with the facts.

So I beseech you, go back and watch the match again, and examine his input with an open mind. I think you will find that it wasn’t great, but it certainly wasn’t as bad as has been portrayed by the baying mob.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex8vt1ZIJSU