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All the plaudits and praise have gone the way of the Waratahs’ flying backs in light of their convincing 32-5 win over the Reds on Saturday night.
But just as interesting for me was the manner in which the Tahs forwards dominated their Queensland opponents.
Immediately after the match, Waratahs coach Michael Cheika told Rod Kafer on Fox Sports, “I thought we did a good job in slowing them down in the tackle,” before going on to outline how they planned to take on the mobile Reds pack – and particularly their young backrow trio – in this area rather than directly at the breakdown.
Cheika’s explanation was petty sound. Rather than trying to compete and hopefully dominate an area where the Reds themselves were dominant the week before, the Tahs instead did their hard work in the initial contact, before the ruck was formed.
If they couldn’t produce the turnover at that point, then it became a job of ensuring the Reds couldn’t just place the ball back quickly and effectively.
This greatly reduced the speed at which Reds and Wallabies scrumhalf Will Genia could get at the ball in the first place, while also reducing the time and space in which he could get the ball away – be that for phase runners or to find Quade Cooper out wider in an attempt to unleash the Reds’ backs.
The double effect of this was that the Reds backrow were almost completely nullified, an almost Jekyll and Hyde display that looked nothing like the effective machine Eddie Quirk, Liam Gill and Jake Schatz were in Canberra the week before.
Post-match, Cheika was pretty keen to dull everything down a fair bit, insisting the Waratahs certainly weren’t front-runners because “we’ve barely got out of… what are those things? The barriers. We haven’t even left the barriers yet.”
He got the analogy out in the end, and it’s a reasonable point to make that we are still only in the first week in March.
Cheika also rightly pointed out that if the Rebels do a number on the Force this weekend coming, they’ll join the Tahs on 10 competition points.
Regardless, he applauded the work of his forwards, and the job they did in providing the platform for Bernard Foley, and to a lesser extent Kurtley Beale, to wreak havoc out wider.
“Yeah, they worked hard,” Cheika answered rather understatedly, to the question of how impressed he was with his forwards pack.
“We’re basing a lot of our stuff on real simple… nothing too technical, just simple stuff like working hard. And if we can try and work harder than the opposition, we’ll get some pay.
“I know it doesn’t sound exciting, but it’s just the maths of it, you know. If you’ve got more blokes up there that are playing, you’re going to get a better outcome.”
The ‘bodies on the line’ game plan was greatly aided by two major factors in this game against the Reds.
First of all, the ability to slow a team down at the tackle becomes infinitely easier when you’ve got a couple of guys in the pack like the hard-working Stephen Hoiles and the already popular new marquee man, former Bulls wrecking ball Jacques Potgieter.
The Tahs’ backrow of Hoiles, Michael Hooper and Wycliff Palu between them accounted for just under half the forwards’ total tackles made, with the starting pack bringing down Reds at better than 90 per cent effectiveness.
The Reds forwards as a pack made less metres run than did the Waratahs’ three backrowers combined, another indication of just how one-way the forwards battle was.
This leads into the second factor, being the continued resurgent form of Palu himself.
I can’t recall Palu starting a season anywhere near as impressively as 2014 thus far. For one, Palu often hasn’t even started the season, but also the attritional ‘win ugly’ methods of Waratahs teams past haven’t fitted the natural Palu game anything like the Cheika blueprint.
Again, though, Cheika just wants to downplay things.
“Yeah, he’s going well,” Cheika said, rather nonchalantly in the presser on Saturday night, before elaborating to suggest that Palu’s form is a decent reflection on the rest of the team.
And that’s a reasonable point, too; the way the team and Palu himself have started so consistently is a major reason why rugby fans are already speaking in optimistic terms about the Wallabies.
The key now, for both Palu and the Waratahs as a team, is to go on with the job from here.