SPIRO: May the best Super Rugby coach (Michael Cheika?) win!

Roy Masters, one of the great sports writers of his generation, is wrong when he argues that the criticism of Benji Marshall’s play as a rugby number 10 is due to rahs rahs trying to justify the claims that their game is far too complex for league players to master quickly.

Anyone who saw Marshall playing for the Blues in the trial match with the Waratahs saw a player who resembled a duck on thin ice.

He really didn’t have a clue where to stand, what to do or when to do it. He also looked to be unfit for the aerobic requirements of the rugby game.

It’ll be no surprise, therefore, if the Blues start Marshall on the bench in their opening match of the 2014 Super Rugby tournament against the Highlanders. Coach John Kirwan needs to get his team winning matches.

Indulgences like starting celebrity players before they have come to terms with the new game will not cut it with the Blues supporters.

The point that Masters missed is that rugby is a complicated game. It is chess to the rugby league checkers.

The complications of rugby, now that the game is professional, have created an environment where a coach with new ideas or new takes on old ideas can make a huge input into the performance of his side.

And the alternative works out, as well. A coach who hasn’t got a real clue about selection or how to get the best out of the players at his disposal will be exposed as a loser.

The priority has to be sound selecting. And Kirwan seems to be acknowledging this with his decision to play Marshall off the bench.

But there is possibly even a greater priority to working out a method playing that the players buy into, which is effective and which suits the tradition of the franchise involved.

There is no one right way of playing winning rugby. But there are many wrong ways.

We saw this in practice last weekend in a good way with the way Jake White has re-shaped the Sharks, with sound selections in the halves, and a coherent game plan that suits the physicality of his South African players.

The Sharks looked like a side that is ready to challenge strongly for Super Rugby honours.

On the other hand, we saw with the Bulls (the only South African side to win the Super Rugby championship) a side that is continuing with tactics and players (Victor Matfield) that are no longer relevant to the environment of 2014.

The Bulls game plan of scoring penalties and the occasional try through rolling mauls hasn’t evolved in a decade.

Teams know what to expect of them now and how to counter the one attacking ploy of the rolling maul.

Getting back to Marshall and coach Kirwan, the fact is that the Blues have become the Waratahs of New Zealand rugby, except for the fact that they have actually won three Super Rugby titles. The franchise should be the strongest in terms of playing numbers, support and results in New Zealand rugby.

The point here though is that these wins, including the third, involved the master coach Graham Henry either as the coach or the de facto coach. Without Henry the franchise has produced poor results and produced teams that don’t seem to have much of a clue about proper tactics or patterns of play.

Henry is back again for a third stint at the Blues and, if Kirwan listens to him as he probably will, the Blues should be a better side than they have been in the recent past.

For when you look at the history of the Super Rugby tournament, you look at a history of a masterful coach (at least the provincial level) creating a team culture and, more importantly, a coherent and effective style of play that enhances the abilities of the players and makes their team winners.

You could call this the Henry factor, or the Deans factor, or the Dave Rennie factor.

Talking about Deans, it is interesting that the Crusaders haven’t won a Super Rugby title since their triumph under Deans in 2008. Todd Blackadder needs to win a trophy, I would think, or else someone else will take over.

Rennie is going for a three-peat with the Chiefs. He was a successful coach of the New Zealand Under-20s, winning world titles in every tournament he coached them in. He has turned the Chiefs into a dynasty of sorts.

The opening match of the weekend, Crusaders-Chiefs, is going to tell us a lot about how the New Zealand Conference will turn out.

We could or should talk, too, about the Rod Macqueen factor, even though he never won a Super Rugby title with the Brumbies. Eddie Jones was the actual coach of the Brumbies in their Super Rugby triumphs.

But it was Rod Macqueen who put the squad together and created the Brumbies continuity game that opponents found so difficult to contain, for a number of seasons.

The problem for the Brumbies has been that the Macqueen game has not been re-shaped since its great exponents like Stephen Larkham and George Gregan have retired.

Admittedly, Jake White took the Brumbies to the last year’s grand final on the back of a negative, South African-type kicking for position and playing for penalties game.

The new coach, Stephen Larkham, will have to do more than just unfurl White’s old game plans for the Brumbies to match or better the success of last year.

The Brumbies, unlike White’s new team the Sharks, just do not have the forwards to dominate teams in the tough forward exchanges that White’s attritional game plan requires.

Richard Graham, the Reds new coach, has in fact predicted that Larkham will continue the ‘boring Brumbies’ method.

But this surely is just teasing on the part of the Reds. You would think that the one of the inventive running backs Australian rugby has produced will come up with more from his talented backs than the restricted patterns they played to last season.

Graham, along with Larkham and Tony McGahan, is one of three new head coaches of Australian franchises. Michael Cheika and Michael Foley are in their second year at their franchises, the Waratahs and the Western Force.

These five coaches, therefore, represent the future of Australian rugby in the coaching sphere.

One of them, or hopefully several of them, is going to emerge as the natural successor Ewen McKenzie when his time with the Wallabies is up.

An interesting and innovative Wallabies rugby coach, Daryl Haberecht, used to point out that the laws of rugby are extremely wide open.

Anything that is not ruled out explicitly is in. So Haberecht invented the ‘up-the-jersey-move’ for his Country XV to score a crucial try.

He also got his halfback to run across the top of a collapsed maul on the opposition’s tryline to score a try.

Both these ploys are now banned. But inventive coaches can still find ploys to use to unsettle opponents.

McKenzie, for instance, introduced a 15-man lineout for the Wallabies.

He has used Israel Folau as first receiver from a scrum, in the same way that Jonah Lomu was used for the All Blacks from time to time.

One of the reasons why I had such a high admiration for Macqueen as a coach is that he came up with all sorts of new tactics and tricks, from lining up all this players across the field to chase kick-offs which could go long, short, left or right and thereby upset the allocation of the kick-off receivers: to splitting the lineouts into two pods: and the carefully rehearsed and orchestrated continuity phases game.

Teams now kick long rather than out because Macqueen wanted to set up situations where his teams could run the second kick back.

But then teams like the All Blacks and the Crusaders (with a major contribution here from Deans) have worked out ways of running the ball back rather than kicking back like most other teams.

The Bulls have exploited (and now have over-exploited) the driving maul from lineouts with the modern embellishment of the maul becoming a single file attack with the ball held four players back in the line.

The modern rugby coach is like the conductor of an orchestra. The players will play differently, better or worse, depending upon the skills of the conductor.

The process is hard to pin down or define. But one conductor will get a different and better sound from the same group of players as a less competent or inspired conductor.

While the process is hard to pin down, the outcomes are self-evident. In rugby terms, for example, the best coaches tend to win more games and more tournaments than coaches of lesser ability.

This is why rugby, like the sports that have been professional far longer like league, soccer and gridiron, is becoming a coach-led sport.

While I was writing this an email arrived from the Waratahs announcing the starting XV to play the Force on Sunday. What a side, on paper at least.

The pack is huge, with Will Skelton and Kane Douglas as two massive locks. There are seven Wallabies in the forwards and six in the backs, with the lively winger Alofa Alofa, a former league player, being the only exception in the backs.

Bernard Foley and Kurtley Beale are selected as a five-eighths pair. They should be able to set up plenty of chances for Folau and other outside backs.

By my reckoning, this is about as impressive a group of players a coach can hope to have under his control in a Super Rugby franchise. Can Cheika be the great conductor this group needs to realise their potential as a successful playing group?