Another win but more uncertainty for the Wallabies

If last week’s win over South Africa offered up unanswered questions like I suggested it did, then none of those questions were answered on Saturday night.

If anything, the Wallabies’ 32-25 win probably threw up even more uncertainty about where exactly the Wallabies are right now.

Once again, preparations and thoughts ahead of this column were as conflicting. It was difficult picking a route to head down. It really was one of those games where it was frustrating to watch the rugby on show, yet you also had to be impressed that the Wallabies were still able to secure the win, almost in spite of themselves.

My regular weekend morning rugby chat on ABC Grandstand Digital radio then provided an interesting perspective.

With the team bus waiting in the background, we were able to have a really good chat with Wallabies assistant coach, Andrew Blades.

Encouragingly, many of the post-mortem criticisms levelled at the Wallabies on the forums and via social media after the win are the same as those already being focussed on internally. Execution across the park was well short of the required standard, and some of the decision-making left a lot to be desired.

I say ‘encouragingly’ because my worry was that Blades would trot out the common coaching sound bites, that the application is there, the skill levels are fine, etc, things just ‘didn’t go our way on the night’.

The Wallabies’ had ample opportunities to put Argentina away in this game. They bombed at least two tries in the ten minutes before halftime, both of them involving dummies being thrown to unmarked players.

In the Rob Horne case, Michael Hooper butchered that try a second time, when he cleared out beyond the ball from the subsequent ruck. It’s not easy to bomb the same try twice.

Curious that execution issues were being admitted to, I asked Blades how or what could be done about the situation, given the Wallabies now don’t reconvene until later this week in Sydney, and then fly out for Cape Town next Monday morning.

“Good point. We don’t get back into camp until Friday. So we’ll have a camp Friday-Saturday-Sunday, so Friday we’ll have a look at the game and the areas we’re got to improve, and then Saturday and Sunday we’ll work on them,” Blades began.

“It’s obviously difficult with a long trip to South Africa. You don’t get a lot of training time once you’re there, so we’ve just got to keep drilling down these areas and keeping working on them.

“Obviously, the mistakes side of things and the pressure of Test Matches – especially in wet conditions, but even if it’s not wet – it wasn’t acceptable.

“I think our area around the breakdown last night, while we were very enthusiastic, some of our placement against a team that plays at the ball on the ground a lot, wasn’t as good as it can be. So one, we’ve got to be hard on ourselves in our review, sit down and go through all these areas and address the areas where we’ve been sloppy, and two, then we’ve got to go and put it out there on the training park and get some transference onto the field from that.” he said.

Following on from this, and particularly Blades’ suggestion that the team needed to be hard on themselves, I then asked if he thought the skill sets within the squad were good enough to make the necessary improvements.

“When you’re playing a game where you’re trying to play ball-in-hand with limited time and space against very aggressive defences, the skill level has to be there and the combinations have to be there,” Blades said.

“Obviously, we’ve got guys from the Waratahs who tried to play that style of game this year, and we’ve got guys from the Brumbies and other teams who play a very different style, and we’re having some cohesion issues when we get into those broken-field positions with combinations there as well.

“I think a lot of the guys have got the skill level, it’s just attitude that you can’t be sloppy. I think it’s more a mental thing; when you get into those areas, you’ve got to make good decisions, like when it’s appropriate to throw that extra pass.

“There were times last night, I thought, where we saw space on the edges and we tried to get to them without going forward first, and that was a key issue for me. We were throwing or trying to throw cut-out passes over the top of defenders where we should’ve just taken the ball hard into them once more, and then they would’ve been short on the outside anyway.

“So I think those sort of things you can only get by repetition, and guys watching and reviewing themselves, and by seeing those opportunities and making better decisions down the line.”

Blades went onto say after this that the Wallabies try and train at speeds faster and intensities higher than what players would typically experience at Test level, to try and get them used to making decisions under pressure and when fatigued. This is a common technique used in top level referee training, too.

And after passes were thrown that needn’t have been, and when unmarked players were ignored, that’s certainly evidence that the decision-making under pressure still needs work.

What’s more, the team knows that they didn’t play as well as they can, and that their executions and skills were off the mark. This is a good sign, in my opinion, because it would’ve been much harder to believe the Wallabies are capable of making the required improvements if they didn’t think they had an issue.

The comment about attitude is interesting, too.

And I should add, to finish, that the Wallabies did play well to create the chances they did, especially in the first half. I don’t think it’s too big a stretch to suggest they should’ve been up by 12 or 14 points more than they were at halftime.

Hopefully, all the execution issues can be addressed in the preparations for Cape Town.