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The win in Cardiff on Saturday night, even if the final score was closer than how the game played out, was just about the perfect way for the Wallabies to finish 2013.
The overall record for 2013 will read seven wins from 15 starts, including series losses to the British and Irish Lions, yet another Bledisloe Cup, and the Mandela Plate, too. Australia finished third in The Rugby Championship, by virtue of two wins over Argentina.
However, of the eight losses incurred, six of them came in the first eight games of the year.
This period represents the handover period from Robbie Deans to Ewen McKenzie, and there’s no point in downplaying it, it was a testing period for Wallabies supporters, players, and coaches alike.
I can’t imagine HQ was overly thrilled, either.
I’ve used the win over Argentina in Rosario as something of landmark quite often over the last few months, and it’s become even more obvious with every game since.
This win marked the beginning of what I think we all expected to see – even if perhaps unfairly – from Day 1 under McKenzie.
This final part of the season, which I think can be broken down into three parts, produced five wins from seven games and has begun restoring a lot of lost faith in the national team.
And yes, the five wins came against opposition sides ranked below the Wallabies, but the overall story has become more important than the component details.
And that is, that the Wallabies are now playing in a way that makes them worthy of being watched again.
The attacking mindset is back, the team is harder at the breakdown, and even from the couch, there looks to be a real unity within the team.
We are seeing proper 1 to 15, even 1 to 23 performances now. This goes for the losses to New Zealand and England in this same period, too.
I debated its very existence throughout the year, but we just may be getting back to – or maybe creating all over again – that fabled Australian way of playing rugby.
With all this in mind, I think it’s only fair that I devote the final rugby column of the year to positivity and explore a few things that have impressed me about the Wallabies as they closed the year out.
Upfront, this will mean overlooking a few obvious areas still requiring action.
Those areas are pretty well known, and anyway, we’ve been talking about them all year.
Let this be the caveat that acknowledges that the Wallabies side that finished the season is far from perfect, and we’ll get on with enjoying what we have.
This Folau bloke looks handy
We were all fairly reticent to make any bold predictions after Folau’s first few tentative outings this year, but the way he’s finished the season as the equal leading Wallabies try-scorer in a calendar year is a wonderful achievement for someone we’ve long forgotten is still in his first year of professional rugby.
He just gets more and more comfortable with every outing at international level, and by the end of the Spring Tour, teams would kick to him at the peril.
What’s most impressed me is the way he’s gone looking for opportunities on this tour, and not just waited to be used. This is a ‘rugby brain’ developing nicely.
Even better, and I mentioned this a few weeks ago, is that Folau has become the attacking weapon he is because he’s been used cleverly.
Because the Wallabies’ attack is thankfully so much more than ‘Just Give It To Folau’, opposition defences are in two minds every time he presents in the line.
Stephen Moore is a machine
On the back of an overly long Super Rugby season, which broke only for a Lions series in which he played all but every minute, Stephen Moore then played on through The Rugby Championship, and confirmed his pending immortal status on the Spring Tour.
The guy cannot be human, surely.
In all bar the Scotland game, where he played 77 minutes, Moore played 68-70 minutes, obviously a plan to keep one of the most experienced and most important Wallabies on the pitch for as long as possible.
His set piece work was from the top draw all year, he tackled and ran and rucked and mauled superbly all year, and if he’s not the best hooker in world rugby right now, he must surely be in the grand final.
Accidental heroes
One the most pleasing aspects of the Wallabies this year was the emergence of players as Test stars, when their initial selection was thought to be risky, or even a bit of a gamble.
Tevita Kuridrani’s debut, and even Nick Cummins’ recall qualify on either of these grounds, but there may not be any better examples of both than Scott Fardy and Matt Toomua.
Neither were picked in the positions they play mostly at Super Rugby level, but the two of them took up the challenge with both hands, made the position their own, as the cliché goes, and played so well at blindside flanker and inside centre, respectively, that they were missed almost immediately when not available.
I’ve long thought and said that blindside was the position I thought Fardy plays best at, so he wasn’t so much of a surprise.
However, Toomua has almost always played flyhalf, and has never really been considered as anything else.
He took to No.12 like a duck to water in the second half in Rosario, and became such an outstanding foil for Quade Cooper that he held his place there until injury cut his tour short.
It’s a great story for both players, and it shapes as an interesting Super Rugby season ahead to see how and in what position their International form shines at provincial level.
Depth and competition
If there’s one thing McKenzie can be rightly proud of in his first year in charge, it’s that he has created genuine depth and competition in numerous, if not all positions.
Where it was by design or forced by other events is immaterial; McKenzie’s first selection of 2014 will be noticeably harder than his last of 2013.
Perhaps the best measure of this is that several players on the long-term injury list are no longer the walk-up starters they were presumed to be, even as recently as the end of September.
The likes of David Pocock and Scott Higginbotham will eventually return to the starting side, but the incumbents have certainly made this task harder.
Someone like Kurtley Beale, however, might have a real battle on his hands though, even just to get back into training squads. And that’s not a bad thing at all.
The mooted rebirth of the ARC next year can only help this depth building, too.
Skill levels improving
Think about where the basic skills of Wallabies players was at the start of TRC, and then think about three offloads on the Spring Tour in particular: Moore’s to Cummins against Italy; Fardy’s to Michael Hooper against Ireland, and Cooper’s to Joe Tomane on the weekend against Wales.
All three of them involved engaging the defender before unloading flick pass offloads, and all of them were executed at pretty much full pace.
Just outstanding, and all three of those tries would certainly be among the best the Wallabies scored in 2013.
Tomane, especially, showed superb skills even just to pull the Cooper offload in, but he topped that effort himself by drawing the final Welshman to put Christian Lealiifano away in the corner.
And if we really want to wax lyrical, there’s a whole lot more about the Wallabies to like than just these few topics.
I haven’t mentioned Cooper’s resurgence, or that I now think he’s playing better rugby than his Championship form in 2011, and I haven’t mentioned the return to form from both Will Genia and James Horwill.
Rob Simmons has finished the season very well, and Lealiifano’s goal kicking finished the season as strongly as he started. And the scrum might even be holding ground, to boot.
There really is a lot to like about the Wallabies again, moving forward, and supporters who have endured the full roller coaster of emotions in 2013 have every right to be feeling optimistic at season’s end.
The NRC news last week was even a long-awaited cherry on top.
But it is time to close what has at times felt like the never-ending season, and enjoy the rugby afterglow into the New Year. From the rugby side of my desk, all the best for the festive season and may your respective teams start the 2014 season well.