A tough month ahead for the Brumbies

Someone was always going to be the team the Blues finally beat this season, and unfortunately for the Brumbies, it just happened to be the Australian conference leaders.

Though it might be easy to point the finger at Nic White’s missed penalty right on full time, the Brumbies lost this match well beforehand.

The stats sheet doesn’t give any true indication of much difference between the two sides, and in a 16-14 scoreline, that’s not surprising.

Yes, goal kicking was an issue, with Christian Lealiifano missing a penalty from in front that in the not-too-recent past he’d have kicked blindfolded, and White also missed his later shot from well inside his range.

However, Blues’ flyhalf Dan Bowden also hit the post with an early penalty shot.

The Brumbies once again let themselves down with their execution of the few opportunities they did create, while injuries to some key players obviously caused panic in their play. But I’ll come back to the injuries and their impact moving forward soon.

When the players reviewed the video, some wouldn’t have been pleased with what they saw.

White will see his game deteriorate after he got involved in an ambitious set-to with Jerome Kaino. From that point, White played like an angry player with the weight of the world on his shoulders; his passing lost speed and accuracy, he let himself get dragged into other comings-together with other Blues players, and he seemed to increase the regularity of his ‘encouragement’ for referee Andrew Lees.

Whether all of this became a factor in pushing his final kick to the left of the posts, only White himself will know.

Stephen Moore will see lineout throws straying off line, and that became a factor in the Brumbies losing three lineouts on their own throw. They finished the match with a 77 per cent lineout success rate, whereas they came into the match with a 92 per cent success rate, ranked the best in the competition.

Ben Alexander had a reasonable scrum battle with Blues’ loosehead Ofa Tu’ungafasi, but he’ll only see four pick-and-drive runs (the Opta Sports stats used by SANZAR and ESPNscrum have him making not even one full metre from those four runs), and just two tackle attempts – one of which he missed.

Of the positives the Brumbies will see, there was David Pocock’s herculean effort in the second half, getting through a mountain of defensive work and at one point seemingly pilfering Blues’ ball for fun. It’s fair to say he’s getting somewhere back near his best.

But the Brumbies are a long way off their best as a unit, and coming up they host the Rebels, Highlanders, and Waratahs all at home in successive weeks, before heading to South Africa to play the re-emergent Stormers in Cape Town, and the Lions with their tails up in Johannesburg. A tour that at the start of the season didn’t look too bad is suddenly a whole lot tougher.

The next five games loom as their biggest test to date, and they’ll face it in their worst form of the season. How they emerge from this five-match stretch will quite likely determine whether their season continues past the second weekend in June.

Then there are the injuries, which after being largely limited to fringe players and Pocock earlier in the season, have now claimed a couple of players in key positions.

Matt Toomua picked up an ankle syndesmosis injury in the first quarter of the game and will be looking at a similar healing period to Pocock, who picked up the same injury in the opening game of the season. It’s typically a six-week injury, though Pocock returned after four.

Prop Scott Sio is looking at similar time out of the side, too, after picking up a knee medial ligament strain just after half time. And outside back James Dargaville is looking at two months out, with suspected broken bones in his foot.

Dargaville started the game on the wing, but moved to inside centre when Toomua went off and Lealiifano shuffled in to flyhalf. This would have been the combination the Brumbies expected to take forward in Toomua’s absence, but Dargaville’s injury further compounds the test of backline depth.

And this might turn out to have an even bigger effect on the Brumbies’ season than even the form slump.

Lealiifano will still go to 10; that’s the easy part. It’s how to address the sudden shortage of options at inside centre where things start getting curly.

Unless Tevita Kuridrani and/or Jesse Mogg can stage a miraculous recovery – which, given the sudden injury crisis, is most certainly being explored – it rockets Nigel Ah Wong and Lausi’i Taliauli into contention. Robbie Coleman would be another midfield option, coming forward from fullback, but that might create more problems at the back.

It also means that there will almost certainly be an adjustment of their attacking style – pragmatism, probably – to cushion the transition. Lealiifano himself hasn’t played flyhalf for an extended period for more than three years.

JP Smith will more than likely start in place of Sio, with Allan Ala’alatoa coming onto the bench. The Brumbies scrum had been going pretty well, but like all Australian sides, there is degradation once the starting props are replaced. The Brumbies will have to somehow cope with this from the start now.

While the Brumbies are on an 11-game winning streak at home – dating back to the opening game of 2014 against the Reds – keeping that record intact over the next three weeks would be a remarkable achievement in the current vein of form, never mind with the injuries as well.

It looms as the biggest test for Stephen Larkham’s coaching and selection career, and comes at a crucial juncture in his side’s season. We’ll learn a lot about team and coach alike over the next little bit.