SPIRO: Oh no, swing low the Wallabies chariot without wheels

Let’s be blunt. The Wallabies have ended the 2014 rugby season in a terrible situation.

Their scrum has become such a liability that the hope of even making the finals of the Rugby World Cup 2015 tournament, forget about winning it, must be in serious doubt.

Teams can lose to England at Twickenham and not be too severely damaged. The All Blacks did a couple of years ago and Ireland, despite winning the 2014 Six Nations tournament, did so earlier in the year.

But losing the way the Wallabies did by being scrummed and mauled out of the game is just unacceptable for the ARU, the coaching staff, the Wallabies pack and Wallabies supporters.

The point here is that the backs solved the problems of England’s rush defence. Adam Ashley-Cooper made numerous breaks. But there was no finishing off because whenever England were under pressure near their line they were able to maul or scrum their way out of danger.

Let’s be even blunter. Andrew Blades, a decent chap, a fine prop in his day and apparently a PhD in scrum knowledge, has to go as the Wallabies scrum coach. The Wallabies were out-scrummed and they were out-thought in the scrumming. That is the fault of the scrum coach and the players.

I noticed that in the pre-Test warm-ups that the Wallabies put down some contested practice scrums and one of them collapsed. Blades just continued the scrum practice as if nothing had happened. His behaviour was rather like that of people in a church pretending it wasn’t them or it didn’t happen when someone had emitted a silent fart.

If you allow the front row to go face down into the turf in practice, they will do the same in a match. Good practice makes perfect. But by the same token bad practice makes for a disaster.

Michael Cheika is talking now about the way the Wallabies don’t cheat enough at scrum time and that this is used against him. There may be an element of truth in this.

But to get the right to ‘cheat’ you have to have a scrum that goes forward against its opponents. The Wallabies never did this. At best they held their own. At worst they were turned as if they were on a barbeque and then smashed into the turf.

Like so many aspects of Australian rugby, too, the Wallabies scrum was just plain dumb at times. They allowed the England pack to play mind and actual games with them.

For instance, they allowed the Wallabies to have a steady scrum on the first time Nick Phipps fed the ball in. But not long after this, with the second scrum of the Test, an England feed near their 22, they allowed England to walk around them and then push through, win the penalty and set the situation for referee Jermoe Garces (who did a good job) about the weakness in the Wallabies scrum.

There was a lack of concentration, nous and hard-shouldered pushing in this scrum and most of the other scrums, too, when England put on the heat.

So a new scrum coach is needed and some tough love for the pack is needed too.

Players who don’t front up have to be dropped. Unfortunately, time is running out for this process. It probably has run out, in fact. But the tight five that took the field against England and the reserves should not be considered in any way as obvious choices to make the World Cup squad.

When we move away from the wreck of the scrum, we move into the further wreck of dumb decision-making on the run and with Michael Hooper’s decisions in the first half and second half not to take shots at goal.

Ben McCalman, for instance, gave away an obvious and easy penalty to England when he stupidly checked Mike Brown chasing his own kick. It didn’t help things that Brown, not for the first time this year, took a dive. Referees need to stop this soccer-type gamemanship by reversing the penalty when this cheating is done.

But, despite this, what McCalman did was just plain dumb. Some time, a coach is just going to hook a player who does something as stupid as this early on in the game. England’s George Ford kicked the penalty to give his side a 6-3 lead, after being down 3-0. England never lost this lead during the match.

Luke Jones was equally dumb right after half-time when he pulled down a maul. There was no cunning in what he did. He was virtually out in the open, only metres away from the assistant referee. As it happened, Ford missed the penalty. But this does not excuse stupid play.

Equally dumb was Michael Hooper’s decisions not to go for goal with relatively easy shots, both in the first half when the score was only 6-3, and in the second half when the scoreline was 20-17 and then 23-17.

On none of these occasions did the Wallabies gain any further points. Furthermore, England had the Wallabies measure in the driving mauls. They allowed the Wallabies the front of the lineout and then piled into the maul and shoved it across the field, which counts as stopping its forward momentum.

It was astonishing to me, too, that every time the Wallabies turned down the kickable shots at goal, Tim Horan in the commentary box would exclaim, “Good call!”

No Tim. Stupid call by Hooper and yourself. And we have it totally exposed the lack of rugby intelligence in Australian rugby at the highest levels, on and off the field.

In 1996 Tim Horan captained the Wallabies for the first and only time in a Test against Wales at Cardiff. In that Test, which the Wallabies won by a point, Horan turned down shots at goal to go for tries.

This tour remains the only northern tour in the professional era where the Wallabies won all their Tests. After the Test the Wallabiy coach at the time Greg Smith nicknamed Horan, correctly in my opinion, ‘Captain Crazy’.

So for the umpteenth time, here is one of the Zavos’ First Principles Of Rugby: the more important the match, the more important it is to take the shot.

As I type this I notice in my notes that just after half-time the Wallabies won a penalty just inside England’s half. They turned down the chance of taking a long range shot at goal in a good kicking stadium, and the chance to reduce the scoreline from England 13 Australia 3, to a 13-6 margin.

As the commentators pointed out, Cheika has to get more structure into the Wallabies play when they are hot on attack. Several promising situations broke down because the players did not know which side the next play was going to go to.

Well-coached teams tend to play their attacks either in one direction, with play flowing time after time across the field. Another pattern, sometimes used by the All Blacks, is to reverse the flow of play from ruck to ruck.

The important point is not the actual sequence but whether the players know which sequence is going to be used. When they know this, they know to position themselves to hit the rucks and maintain the momentum.

So the Wallabies now have collapsed into a losing season of seven losses, six wins and a draw. Moreover, the Wallabies have suffered their worst northern tour since the Eddie Jones disaster of 2005. As I noted last week, at least they can’t be accused of peaking too early before the 2015 Rugby World Cup.

The worrying thing about the Test and its result is that England weren’t all that impressive in achieving their victory. Their backline, aside from two lively wingers, is pedestrian. They did not make any breaks, despite the dominance of their pack. They allowed the Wallabies, though, to carve them up on a number of occasions.

England showed that some muscle in the tight contact areas of the play is more than enough to nullify whatever brilliance the Wallabies can bring to their back line play.

England play Australia at Twickenham in the ‘Pool of Death’ round-robin at the Rugby World Cup. Right now it is hard to see how the Wallabies can hope to defeat them in this match.

The Wallabies also play Wales in their pool at Twickenham. They had consistently defeated Wales in Australia and at Cardiff some a number of years. In fact, the only Test win on this tour for the Wallabies was yet another victory against Wales at Cardiff.

But while the Wallabies were struggling against England, Wales defeated the Springboks 12-6 at Cardiff in a vibrant Test where both sides were without a couple of top players.

The manner of the Wales win should strike some fear into Wallaby supporters. The Welsh scrum was too powerful for the Springboks on several occasions. They held the famed Springboks maul quite comfortably. And the Welsh backs made breaks against the tight Springboks defensive line.

The points margin flattered the Springboks. Their supporters have been critical of my comments about the brain-dead Springboks tactics dictated by coach Heyneke Meyer. But once again when the Springboks had to score a converted try to snatch a victory, they went back to their driving maul, a bit like a shyster going back to a favourite con that has already been exposed by the authorities.

The only thing that stood between Wales and a massive victory was the lack of belief by the Welsh players that they were in the position of pulling out a famous victory.

So in summing up the two Tests in the context of Australia, England and Wales being in the same Rugby World Cup pool that allows only two teams to emerge into the finals, I would say this: Wales achieved a victory in substance and style that will give them confidence, finally, going into 2015.

England won with some substance but with no style and, like the Springboks, they seem to be very one-dimensional with a might is right approach that tends to win only when the opposition lack muscle and power in their play.

The Wallabies had some style but no substance, a combination that clearly leaves them exposed and vulnerable against any side that fields a strong set-piece pack.

Clearly, Cheika has a huge task in front of him to get the Wallabies up to a level where they can challenge not only the teams that were above them on World Rugby rankings but also teams like France, Wales and Argentina that were below them.

You can’t help thinking that what Australian rugby needs more than anything else right now is coaching support who think deeply about the game and have ideas that can help the Wallabies improve out of their current mediocrity.

Surely it is time to form a brains trust of people like Scott Allen, Phillip Fowler, Rod Kafer, Bob Dwyer and Mark Ella.

There is a sense that all sport, no matter how elevated in our consciousness, is somehow irrelevant in the great scheme of things. But as Cliff Morgan, lightning fast in foot and thought, once remarked, “sport may be irrelevant but it is a magnificent irrelevance”.

This thought came to me when there were two wonderful tributes to Phillips Hughes at Twickenham and the Millennium Stadium before the Tests there.

At Twickenham all the spectators and players applauded Phillip Hughes for a minute, which should have been 63 seconds I think.

At the Millennium Stadium, the tribute was for Phillip Hughes and for Jackie Kyle, the wonderful, brilliant Ireland and Lions number 10 who made five-eighths play look so simple and lethal and graceful that those of us who were privileged to see him play rank him with immortals like Barry John, Mark Ella, Stephen Larkham and Dan Carter. A player now for the ages.

It was very moving to see the vast crowd at Cardiff stand in silence for a young man from Australia whose cricket career was yet to totally reveal and for a man from Ireland who lived a long life in which he was a legend on the rugby field and then a doctor working for decades in Africa.

I have to admit that I preferred the tribute of applause better than the silence. The sound of hands clapping is one of the most beautiful sounds you can hear. In my mind it always brings back a sense of clear water running down a mountain stream over and around brown rocks, eddying and flowing to finally reach sometime the vastness and infinity of the ocean.

In cricket and rugby you hear this applause, the blessed sound of clapping, as the players depart the bright lights of the field of play and go into the darkness of the stands.

Well played, Phillip Hughes and Jack Kyle.