- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
At the end of a traumatic year and an extremely hard tour of the northern hemisphere, the Wallabies, with their 30 – 26 victory over Wales have finished off with a bang. The victory against Wales has given them a rare winning streak of four victories in a row.
The Zavos Law about rugby journeys is that line is drawn not how you start but how you finish. The Wallabies have finished as winners. And better still, winners who have improved markedly on their play earlier in the year.
Don’t take this from me, though. Here is Paul Rees, The Guardian’s excellent rugby writer: “Australia were unrecognisable from the side that was pummelled and powdersied in the third Test against the Lions at Sydney.”
Rees also made the point that Wales had seven players on the field at the Millennium Stadium who were starters at the Sydney massacre. There were two other Lions players in the Wales squad.
It has to be remembered, too, that the Wallabies were playing their fifth match in Europe. The All Blacks and the Springboks found that three matches in Europe were more than enough as far as tiredness was concerned, after the long grind and travel of Super Rugby, the June Tests and then The Rugby Championship.
The Springboks did not score a point in the second half of their Test against Scotland. And the All Blacks had to score one of rugby great tries to snatch a victory, well into extra time, against an Irish side that the Wallabies had blitzed the week before.
Another point needs to made here. Twice in the Test against Wales, the Wallabies were 10 points behind. It takes a strong side, mentally and physically, to come back from behind after the sort of year the Wallabies have endured.
Then at the end of the Test, the Wallabies had to hold out Wales with a man down (with Cooper given a yellow card).
There were only a few scrums in the Test. But two of them, within scoring distance, were during this period when the Wallabies were holding on to a small lead. Both scrums held up. One of them resulted in a Wallabies penalty.
You get a sense of the ebb and flow of the Test and why spectators and viewers found it such a thrilling encounter from the run of scores: Wales 7 – Australia 0: W10 – A0: W10 – A3: W13 – A3: W13 – A10: W16 – A17: W16 – A20: W16 – A27: W16 – 30: W23 – A30: W26 – A30.
The Wallabies threatened to run away with the Test in its middle sections and Wales, when the tourists looked to be running out of puff, started to storm home at the finish.
But here we come to a difference between northern hemisphere sides and southern hemisphere sides.
When the All Blacks just had to score a converted try with time virtually up, they put on a series of phases, with 11 rucks, 24 completed passes, 110 seconds of play, with every player except for Richie McCaw and Brodie Retallick handling, and Ryan Crotty scoring a try 62m out from where the movement started.
Wales had two chances to score the winning try. They kicked away the ball on both occasions.
Here is another statistic that reinforces the doctrine that running the ball is the way to win Tests. The Wallabies gained 769m with the ball in hand. Wales gained 447m.
Wales did win the penalty count, though, with the Wallabies being caned 18 to 9 against Wales. One of the curious features of Tests in Europe throughout the last month or so has been the way the southern hemisphere teams were penalised heavily when northern hemisphere referees officiated.
And let’s be frank about this, too: the worst decisions by the TMOs have almost invariably been directed against southern hemisphere sides. The lack of alignment of the hemispheres on the rugby laws could have a profound impact on the outcome of the 2015 RWC tournament.
However, enough of that.
Credit where credit is due to Quade Cooper. Planet Rugby made him Man of the Match, which was a correct decision. They described his play as ‘sensational’ which again was a correct assessment.
Ewen McKenzie seems to be determined to build his Wallabies around Cooper. He has made him vice-captain, ahead of Will Genia. To me, the interesting thing is that with the responsibility of leadership, Cooper has shown responsibility on and off the field.
The hospital passes of earlier in the season are gone from the slightly mad play book, and so have the skittish runs and passes. He is taking the ball to the line with shoulders squared and setting his runners into holes. He is getting more than one touch in the same phase of play.
The result is that the Wallabies are scoring tries and this is the way to the top.
Israel Folau has scored 10 tries this season, his first in big time rugby union, which matches the record of 10 scored by Lote Tuqiri.
In my opinion, Folau is already well ahead of Tuqiri as a rugby union player. The best aspect of his play is that he has improved in reading the game, getting involved, catching the high balls on attack and defence and in timing his breaks into the line.
Before the Test, Ben Mowen said that the season would be written off as a disaster if the Wallabies lost to Wales. This was a brave thing to say. But it had merit. A loss would have given the Wallabies the greatest number of Test losses the team had accrued in a season.
The Wallabies did not lose. They are entitled to be excited about the future.
Some very good players are coming back into the squad in 2014, including David Pocock and Scott Higginbotham. There will be decisions to be made here by McKenzie to keep on the warriors like Mowen and Michael Hooper or bring in the more experienced players.
These are the sort of decisions that coaches love to have to make.
For now, though, McKenzie has achieved a record of six wins and six losses. Admittedly, his Wallabies have not defeated a team ranked above them. But four of the six wins have come in the last four Tests. And the Wallabies have regained their position of third on the IRB ranking table.
The talk of the woeful Wallabies has now been stopped and we can talk, with some credibility, of the winning Wallabies going into the 2014 season with three Tests to be played against France in June before the real test, the ultimate challenge to the winning ethic comes with The Rugby Championship.