SPIRO: Wallabies show potential, but can they win at Eden Park?

The Wallabies’ brilliant victory over the All Blacks at Sydney 27-19 was a triumph of outstanding coaching, determined captaincy, belief from every player in the squad, mental and physical fitness and that rare thing in sport – the willingness to put everything on the line in order to win.

It has given the Wallabies’ Rugby World Cup campaign a tremendous burst of energy and optimism, especially as Wales were unimpressive in going down to Ireland over the weekend in a friendly Test.

Daring to win and going through the discipline and pain of forcing yourself forward by shutting out any thought of conceding to defeat is the hardest thing for teams to make themselves endure. The Wallabies did this.

Winning is much harder on the body and on the mind than the comfort of losing and believing that another day and another result, perhaps, will somehow present itself.

There were no short cuts or lazy options taken by the Wallabies. When they got into try-scoring positions they stoically smashed away at the brick wall defence of the All Blacks. Runners crashed their way through tackles. Supporting players rushed into the rucks and mauls with hard shouldered determination.

And when the gaps were there, and even when they weren’t there as in Adam Ashley-Cooper’s astonishing, virtuoso, diving one-handed try, unflinching runners put their bodies on the line to break down the defence.

And on defence, the bravery and belief were equally apparent. In the opening 20 minutes or so the All Blacks attacked strongly, despite some uncharacteristic mistakes, including a knock-on from the kick-off. During this opening onslaught, the Wallabies poured back in defence as energetically as they poured forward on attack in the last 20 minutes of the Test.

Outstanding in the defensive contests was Matt Giteau. Sonny Bill Williams was as well contained as in any Test he has played in. He was tackled low and when he was on the ground the scavenging loosies, David Pocock and Michael Hooper in particular, attacked the ball with the persistence of carrions picking at a dead body.

Rod Macqueen was fond of quoting from the Chinese general Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War “The battle is won before the battle is fought.”

This famous Wallabies victory, which gives the team The Rugby Championship trophy for the first time since 2011, was won as much in the preparation of the side as in its play on the field.

Throughout the week and even after the Test, the Wallabies talked about trusting their processes and systems to give them a result that they could be proud of. They did not talk about winning the Test.

The irony here, and Bob Dwyer was one of the first coaches to understand this point, is that having the obsessive goal of winning is often an impediment in actually achieving a victory. If you get behind in a Test, the winning obsession can distract the team from its game plan and lead to effective systems being abandoned in a frenetic effort to catch up.

The impressive aspect of the 2015 Wallabies is that they have come from behind in all three winning Tests this season in the last 20 minutes. And they have scored their winning points by going through their phases, ruthlessly and patiently, setting up their opponents for the final, lethal attack on the try line.

An important part of the preparation was the successful attempt to de-mythologise the All Blacks. Throughout Bledisloe Cup week, Michael Cheika and all the players steadfastly refused to allow the words “All Blacks” pass their lips.

They talked about “New Zealand,” “they,” “our opponents” and often lavished praise on the All Blacks as “the best team in the world.”

After the victory, for instance, Stephen Moore talked about defeating “New Zealand”. When Michael Cheika was asked about his thoughts on going to Eden Park next weekend with an ambition to win back the Bledisloe Cup, he replied: “We are going to stay humble. We’ve only won one game against them. The biggest challenge in rugby is to win at Eden Park.”

The psychology of all this is fascinating. My take on the ploy is that teams/players know they cannot “defeat” the All Blacks, even if they score more points than they do. The All Blacks legend is so entrenched over so many years that it can never be defeated. So even contemplating defeating this legend is in a sense self-defeating.

But you can contemplate defeating “New Zealand,” an entity that has no legendary status. And you can contemplate defeating “the best team in the world.”

This notion about not talking about the All Blacks was used to great success by Bernard LaPorte, the coach of Les Bleus in Rugby World Cup 2007. Laporte refused to talk to journalists who referred to the “All Blacks.” The media conference would end as soon as the dreaded words were uttered.

Wallabies’ fullback, Isreal Folau, attempts to step around his opposite number, Ben Smith. (Photo: Tim Anger)

France won the home ground toss at the Cardiff quarter-final in Rugby World Cup 2007. Laporte insisted on his Les Bleus wearing a specially concocted dark blue jersey, as he was entitled to do. The All Blacks were forced to wear a desultory combination of silver/grey colours.

They played in the spirit of their colours and went down to a scarring defeat that has haunted New Zealand rugby, as the defeat to Wales did during the 1905/6 tour of The Originals.

France also won the home ground rights in their final against the All Blacks in the 2011 World Cup. Jo Maso, the brilliant French centre of the 1970s and part of the management of the side, insisted that the All Blacks must be given the privilege of wearing their iconic black colours in a home Rugby World Cup final.

As a postscript to all of this, England opted to have a black jersey for the Rugby World Cup 2011 tournament, which they wore against the Pumas. It would be interesting to know if, given the opportunity, they would have insisted on wearing black against the All Blacks.

And as a further postscript, World Rugby does not seem to have made any attempt to stop countries with their own historic colours from including the colours of well established rivals in their kit for the 2015 Rugby World Cup tournament. There doesn’t seem to be anything to stop England, if they win the home ground advantage against, say, Australia from opting to play in colours that resemble the Wallaby gold.

The point here, among other things, is that Cheika has worked hard this year to instil into his Wallabies the notion of the respect and pride for the jersey. And not playing in gold would affect the Wallabies in much the same way as not playing in black seemed to have affected the All Blacks in Rugby World Cup 2007.

The promotion of the Wallaby gold jersey this year has been enhanced with advertisements showing prominent Wallabies talking about how they are custodians of “the jersey” while they are playing and how they must hand it over to the next custodian hopefully embellished with what they have done in it.

This is a direct borrowing from the culture of the All Blacks where the reverence for the jersey is so strong that players talk with passion about their custodianship of it, in terms now embraced by the Wallabies.

There have been books about the jersey. New Zealanders of a certain age who were not All Blacks cannot bring themselves to wear it, any more than a pious parishioner will dress up in a priest’s garb for saying the Mass.

What Cheika is doing with promoting the concept of “the jersey” is basic, I believe, to instilling a pride in the performance of the team wearing the jersey that is crucial to the self-image of the 2015 Wallabies.

Another word Cheika used in the build-up which intriqued me is “finishers” to describe the task of the reserve bench. This word gives the reserves a clear description of their task. Cheika has brought a “clarity” (another word the players use and “borrowed” like the jersey concept from the All Blacks) to the play of all the members of the side.

The improvement in the scrumming, which was influential in the outcome of the Test, is due to the props having a clear idea of exactly what their core duties were. You saw this clarity throughout the team, even if the execution as in the case of Nick Phipps was not acceptable for a frontline Test player.

So with the clarity that the word ‘finishers’ suggests, it did not surprise me that the Wallaby reserves all came on and did brilliantly. Matt Toomua put through the dinky grubber kick that Ashley-Cooper converted into a try and more importantly straightened up the running lines of the backline.

James Slipper and Ben McCalman were clever and effective in their play. Will Skelton played made an extremely strong impact when he came on requiring several All Blacks to knock him over when he took the ball up.

Nic White literally won the Test with a successful long-range penalty kick and short-range burst to score the clinching try.

Toomua and White played so well that it would not surprise if they are starters at Eden Park. I’d also look at Drew Mitchell with an eye to playing Henry Speight or Joe Tomane as a starter. Aside from that, the team seems to have a settled air about it.

The big talking point of the Test, before, during and after, was the Pocock-Hooper dynamic. Could two number 7s combine well enough to provide something special for the Wallabies?

Readers of this column will probably know that I suggested, before this Test season, a combination of Pocock at number 8 and Hooper at number 7 in my Wallaby side.

Pocock is 187cm and 115kg. He has the weight and the power for a number 8, and he showed this on Saturday night in a man of the match performance. I see Pocock as a number 8 rather than a number 7, but a number 8 who can be relentless over the ball.

He was good at the back of the scrum, too. And he was adept, as he was for the Brumbies, in running plays from the lineouts.

The first Wallabies lineout in the Test caught the All Blacks napping when a maul was set up at the back of the lineout and then Pocock broke away in a bruising run towards the All Blacks try line.

Hooper is 182cm and 101kg. He has the weight and speed of a loose forward who can play wide as a third centre. It was in this wide channel that Hooper made any number of tackles, including the desperate stop of Julian Savea just before half-time. This tackle prevented a try and kept the Wallabies in the game, 6-3, when it was running against them.

Working together at the set pieces, the Pocock-Hooper tackling and fetching machine, was furiously successful in turning over the All Blacks ball and more often when it could not be turned over slowing it down so much that the All Blacks could not get any flow into their attacks.

Mind you, the All Blacks seemed to play into the hands (literally) of the Pocock-Hooper machine by playing within the 10 and 12 channels with their forwards rather than letting SBW loose by allowing him to run hard at the line to force breaks and off-loads.

This restriction on SBW, either imposed by the coaches or self-imposed, reached the ludicrous situation in the second half, with the All Blacks hunting for points, when he put a grubber kick through into touch rather than charge at a retreating defensive line.

Neither SBW or any other of the All Blacks were served well by a curiously out-of-sorts Dan Carter who was even more studied with his ballooning hospital passes to outside runners than he has been most of this year. Where was the Carter who said he is bringing back his running game? Where were the inside balls? Where was the straightening of the line?

It will be intriquing to see with the Bledisloe Cup on the line whether Steve Hansen will try Lima Sopoaga at number 10 for the All Blacks at Eden Park, or provide Carter with a last chance to entrench his position as the All Blacks first choice number 10.

A distinctive tactical aspect that Cheika has brought to the 2015 Wallabies is their relentless attack at the ruck and maul, both on attack and on defence. It is rare that the All Blacks lose the collisions as frequently as they did on Saturday night.

The statistics suggest that the Wallabies conceded 17 turnovers and the All Blacks 15. Lies, damn lies and statistics, I reckon.

And as I watched the Wallabies smashing into the rucks and mauls, with even Greg Holmes snatching an important turnover near the end of the Test, my mind turned to that great man of Australian rugby, David Brockhoff, the disciple of the need for intensity and courage to spoil your opponent’s ball and protect your own.

As a young man, Brockhoff toured New Zealand in the 1949 Wallabies side, a team that won the Bledisloe Cup in New Zealand for the first time. Brockhoff was a loose forward, with as certain penchant for sea-gulling play that aroused New Zealanders to cat-call him throughout the tour as “offside Brockhoff!”

Down in Dunedin, he met up the great coach of a famous series of Otago sides, Vic Cavanagh Jr. The Cavanaghs, Vic Jr and his father Vic Sr, developed the Otago rucking game which became a signature of All Blacks rugby.

Brockhoff brought this concept back to Australia. And in 1979 he was the Wallabies coach in a one-off Bledisloe Cup Test at Sydney. Against a strong All Blacks side, Brockhoff brought in a small, tearaway, fearless flanker from the Sydney University club (Brockhoff’s club), Andy Stewart, to disrupt every All Blacks ruck.

I was at that Test. It was a ferocious match. Stewart was smashed, bashed, trampled on, belted around but he was able to destroy the flow of possession for the All Blacks and help the Wallabies win a famous victory, their first in Australia since the 1930s.

He remains one of the few – in fact maybe the only – Wallabies with a perfect winning record against the All Blacks: one Test played, one Test won.

Brockhoff was so thrilled about in winning back the Bledisloe Cup that he spontaneously, at the conclusion of the Test, led the Wallabies around the SCG in a thrilling, madcap run with the huge Bledisloe Cup held aloft. There were clips of Brockhoff’s parade on the Fox Sports coverage before the Test on Saturday night.

This is the single event that is reckoned to have revived an interest in the Bledisloe Cup as a trophy. It is now regarded as one of the iconic sports events in world sport.

The victory of Cheika’s Wallabies stopped a run of 10 Tests against the All Blacks where the Wallabies either lost or drew but did not register a win.

There is a certain resonance here with the 1979 Test win by Brockhoff’s Wallabies. Their victory stopped a run of 11 Tests between 1967 and 1978 where the Wallabies failed to defeat the All Blacks.

Now the Wallabies are facing the prospect of having to defeat the All Blacks at their fortress Eden Park to win back the Bledisloe Cup.

Can they do it? Their victory at Sydney was conclusive. And if the All Blacks play in the similar disjointed manner, make mistakes of handling and tactics and present a scrum that was bettered by the Wallabies, a victory is possible.

Admittedly, the All Blacks rarely lose at Eden Park. You have to go back to 1996 in a loss to France for their last Test defeat there. The last time the All Blacks lost to the Wallabies at Eden Park was in 1986. Moreover, after a draw at Sydney last year, the All Blacks monstered the Wallabies in their next Test at Eden Park.

You would think that the All Blacks will have learnt the lessons from the Sydney Test. With the home ground advantage and with a determination not to relinquish the Bledisloe Cup that they will rise to the occasion and play like the great side, I believe, they still are.

Still hoodoos exist to be broken, as the 1949 Wallabies demonstrated…