SPIRO: Wallabies need to stop whining and start winning

Israel Folau’s runaway intercept try towards the end of the second 2013 Bledisloe Cup Test at Wellington provided the Wallabies with enough points and a 27-16 score line to avoid a third successive 18-plus point loss.

That is the good news.

The previous two Tests had seen the Wallabies go down to the British and Irish Lions at Sydney and then to the All Blacks with successive losses of 18-plus, the first time in 60 years that this has happened.

The bad news is that the Bledisloe Cup has now been retained by the All Blacks for the 11th successive year.

The All Blacks have won eight Rugby Championship matches in succession. They play the Pumas at Hamilton in two weeks time.

A victory to the All Blacks will enable them to draw level with the previous best, nine successive wins, a record also held by the All Blacks.

The All Blacks have now won their last 27 home Tests. The home record for successive wins is 30, which was established by the All Blacks between 2003 and 2008.

All this suggests that it was a folorn hope that the Wallabies win the Bledisloe Cup this year, as two of the three Tests are in New Zealand, at Wellington and Dunedin.

Next year, two of the Tests will be in Australia, at Sydney and Brisbane. The All Blacks are certain to play their Bledisloe Cup Test at Eden Park, the fortress where they have been undefeated since 1994.

Since 2003 the All Blacks have established a dominance over the Wallabies that resembles a similar dominance that Queensland have consolidated over New South Wales in State of Origin contests over the last eight years.

There are similar reasons for the dominance, too. Both the All Blacks and the Maroons have a group of players in critical positions who are among the greatest ever to have played their game.

Around this great core there are a much larger group of player, virtually everyone else in the team, in fact, who are among the best players in the world in their particular position.

If you go through the Wallabies and the All Blacks, player by player and position by position, who would you play from the Wallabies in the composite side?

Before the Tests, Will Genia would have been a certainty to be selected for a composite side. But at Sydney and Wellington he was comprehensively outplayed by Aaron Smith.

Smith (Aaron) made the third most carries (seven) in the Test of any All Black. Genia was not in the top three Wallaby carriers (Jesse Mogg 12, James Horwill 10, Ben Mowen 10).

Mogg vs Dagg? No contest for the All Black.

Israel Folau vs Julian Savea? Folau was slightly busier than in the first Test. He scored an intercept try and he contested several kick-offs, with some success.

But, in the totality of the Test, he was missing rather than leading the attack. Savea popped up all over the field and was involved in both of Ben Smith’s tries.

James O’Connor vs Ben Smith? O’Connor, in my view, was the Wallabies best on the ground. He made the most metres – 95, Folau had 91 – with some great breaks. He cover-tackled well. But Ben Smith has scored five tries in two Tests marked by O’Connor.

Adam Ashley-Cooper, Christian Lealiifano and Matt Toomua were all out-played by their opposites, although Toomua did take the ball to the line more than in the first Bledisloe Cup Test.

In the forwards, the only Wallaby with any pretensions to be better than his opposite was James Horwill. Horwill made seven tackles and 10 ball carries.

His opponent, All Black Brodie Retallick, won six lineouts, the most of any forward with Sam Whitelock also having six and Ben Mowen four. Retallick also made 12 tackles, second to Richie McCaw 16, with Keiran Read third on 11.

Michael Hooper made six tackles, with exemplifies the dominance of the All Blacks loose forwards. Steve Luatua with 48 metres was the leading forward runner in metres gained.

The Wallabies also lost two scrums and had great difficulty with other scrums. The point here is that with the new regulations, as with the old regulations, it is Australian teams that are finding it hard to scrum successfully.

The Australian props go to ground far more than other props.

Ewen McKenzie, a former prop, says he can’t understand why the Wallabies are being penalised in the scrums. The answer is obvious from watching the Springboks-Pumas and the ITM matches in New Zealand.

Australian props/second rowers aren’t scrumming very well. They don’t seem to be able to absorb pressure and stay on their feet, rather than collapsing the scrum.

This brings us to McKenzie’s comments after the match. He was critical of the refereeing of the scrums. If he can’t see what everyone else can see, there is no hope for the Wallabies going into the future.

The answer is to toughen up and tighten up, as the Pumas did at Mendoza after they were smashed in Johannesburg.

McKenzie, too, was irate that the referee Jaco Peyper did not go to the television match official for Stephen Moore’s attempt at scoring a close range try.

Peyper was in a good position to see what happened. It did seem to me that Moore spilled the ball as he was planting it for a second attempt.

There was also criticism of the way the All Blacks gave away penalties near their try line. James Horwill made the same point early in the Test pointing out that this had happened in Sydney, too. ‘That was another Test, James’ Peyper told him, correctly.

I thought at the time that Horwill was taking a risk making this sort of complaint and calling for a yellow card because the Wallabies did the same thing as the All Blacks when they were under pressure near their try line.

The penalty count was 16-8 in favour of the All Blacks, and it could have been even more with Stephen Moore being on the wrong side, deliberately, of the most of the rucks and mauls he was engaged with.

I think that coaches should not complain about the referees. It smacks of making excuses, and this in turn does not create the environment for the coach and the team to put right what needs to be put right.

The All Blacks never criticise the referees, for example.

Even after the quarter-final of RWC 2007 at Cardiff between the French and the All Blacks where Wayne Barnes (and the touch judges) gave probably the worst refereeing display in modern times, Graham Henry kept quiet for six years before unleashing on Barnes.

Henry was no longer the All Blacks coach when he made his devastating critique of Barnes’ performance.

The current All Blacks coach, Steve Hansen, made this point after the Wellington Test.

“I think you can pick holes in every decision mate, but where does it get you? … They just need to be consistent and I thought Peyper was consistent from whoa to go,” he said.

How can the Wallabies solve their scrum problems, which are real as was obvious in the later stages of the Test, when McKenzie says, “I used to be able to work out what a scrum penalty was, and now I can’t – and I used to play in the front row.”

Here is what the New Zeand Herald’s rugby writer Gregor Paul wrote about the scrums:

“By the second half, the Wallabies were in danger of having someone seriously hurt in the scrums – especially on their own put-in.

“The Wallabies were on toast when it did – buckling, bending and generally not being overly fussed about where the ball was at that point. No one was too sure about the new scrum laws last week – now they are.

“The All Blacks got their rewards for being stronger, technically better and mentally tougher.”

Memo one to Ewen McKenzie: If you can’t work it out bring in someone who can work it out, or else get smashed by the Springboks scrum at Brisbane.

Memo two to Ewen McKenzie: Get some variety into the Wallabies’ attacking plays. Where are the shifts, the double-arounds, the inside balls, and the wingers and fullbacks into the line?

The Wallabies had 104 ball carries and made only 16 tackle busts. They only occasionally threatened the All Blacks tryline and only occasionally offered tricky questions to the defence.

I like the Fox Sports coverage of the Tests. Greg Clarke is an accurate and informed caller. Tim Horan and Nathan Sharpe offer what former Test players should, which is detailed, impartial observations about what is happening.

Their explanations allow viewers to see more than what they would with only their own eyes.

Rod Kafer is generally terrific with his explanations about the various ploys and why they work or don’t work. But for this Test he lost it by claiming that Peyper was the ’16th man’ on the field.

Kafer got carried away when Phil Kearns started blaming every play that did not favour the Wallabies on poor refereeing.

His incessant and generally often observations were like a toothache just adding misery to the misery the Wallabies were going through as the All Blacks out-played them.

My objection to this sort of obnoxious chauvinism in the guise of commentary is that it does not give viewers an acceptable interpretation of what actually happened.

We will find this morning, for instance, that many Roarers will be blaming the referee instead of focussing on the distressing fact that the Wallabies have lost four of their five Tests this season, and they have fallen from number three in the world at the end of the Robbie Deans era to number four, and falling fast.

Marc Hinton, a NZ rugby writer, summed up the Test this way:

“There was not much positive for the Wallabies on the night when they were almost always chasing. Their kick game was again sub-par, and they fell off too many tackles to be happy with their defensive effort … This was New Zealand’s night again.

“Too good, too strong. One more year, Australia.”

There will have to be changes in the forwards and backs to take on the Springboks at Brisbane. Despite the fact that it was a close match, the relevant fact for the Springboks is that they won their first Tri Nations/Rugby Championship away game since 2009.

They will be primed for Brisbane and the Wallabies need to get rid of the notion, promoted rather bizarrely by Kafer after the Wellington Test, that the Wallabies have somehow turned the corner in their performance.

This attitude will lead the Wallabies up a blind alley.

The hard fact is that in his first two Tests, McKenzie has not added anything to the Wallabies that wasn’t there under Deans except to whine about the referee.

Can anyone (Kafer? Kearns? anyone) explain why towards the end of the Test when points were needed in terms of tries rather than penalties that Quade Cooper and Jesse Mogg kicked the ball away instead of running it back at the All Blacks?

And where were James O’Connor and Israel Folau when Cooper and Mogg fielded the ball inside their own half?

Why weren’t they dropping back to be in position to launch an attack?

The players need to have the riot act read out to them, and not to the referee.