The Brumbies may be the only Aussie Super Rugby finalists

The Waratahs’ tough 15-13 victory over the Reds was, as Rod Kafer described it, “an old-fashioned grudge match”.

In the end, the Waratahs had more control in the halves, Nick Phipps and Bernard Foley, with their grit and poise under intense pressure, provided the winning edge for their side.

The crucial moments in the match came just before half-time, when the Reds, leading 10-5, mounted a series of attacks inside the Waratahs’ 22. There was no rhyme or reason in these attacks. Players ran around like headless chooks.

» Waratahs vs Reds live blog

The attack badly needed direction and control. Nick Frisby and Jake McIntyre could not provide. Nor could the vastly overrated Karmichael Hunt, the player brought at great cost (in several meanings of the word) from AFL to provide leadership on and off the field.

Why the Reds didn’t settle for a drop goal attempt, given the fact that they found scoring tries almost impossible, is beyond me.

But they didn’t. And inevitably, given the lack of method and precision in their play and the greasy conditions, the ball was spilled. The Waratahs broke away and moments later Israel Folau was crossing over for his second try.

The same sort of situation confronted the Reds towards the end of the match. And once again they could not work their way back into a position where a drop goal (they weren’t going to score any more tries!) could have snatched victory.

There were some good things about the Reds’ play. Their scrum was a beast that threatened to annihilate the Waratahs. The Reds won one penalty try with it and in the second half could have been awarded another.

The form of Liam Gill was outstanding. In his 40 minutes on the field he out-played Michael Hooper. He showed that for the all-round skills of a loose forward, he is probably the best of all the flankers currently going around in Australia.

What a pity the Richard Graham regime was, apparently, a reason why such a gifted player is prepared to leave Australian rugby. And here is the rub. How much effort did the ARU make to try and keep him in Australian rugby? Certainly not as much effort and money that was invested in Quade Cooper!

You can’t win big matches on scrums alone, that is the problem right now for the Reds. Once the scrum is over, they seem bereft of any idea of what to do with the ball.

The Waratahs, on the other hand, have good systems in place and players who can implement these systems. Bernard Foley’s presence certainly improved the quality of the Waratahs’ play once the ball was somehow extricated from a scrum that was usually in the process of disintegrating.

The Waratahs had lineout problems as well. There has to be some discussion in the franchise about the quality of the coaching of the forwards, an area that Cameron Blades controls.

The way the Waratahs are bashed around in the set pieces suggests that the team can’t be a serious contender for tournament honours, or even the finals, unless something is done to turn things around.

My theory is that the Waratahs forwards are not in awe and sometimes terrified by Daryl Gibson, the new coach, or Blades, the way they were with Michael Cheika.

History tells us that coddled Waratahs become the Wobbly Waratahs. And unless there is massive improvement in the tight five this could be the fate of the Waratahs for 2016.

There were six changes to the Waratahs side that for 60 minutes was monstered at Sydney by the Highlanders. The most significant of these changes were the introductions of Jack Dempsey as the No.6 and Jed Holloway as the No.8.

Both of them made a significant impact on the outcome of the match.

Will Skelton was dropped to get 80 minutes of club rugby play. He no doubt will be brought back but I would prefer Gibson to start Sam Lousi as one of the second rowers. He has size and lot more energy around the field right now than Skelton.

Dean Mumm and David Dennis (who is going overseas at the end of the season) have done their dash for the Waratahs. And it may be that Lousi and a fitter Skelton will be the second row pairing going through the tournament and next year.

A win is a win, presumably, for the Waratahs. They were sitting on successive losses. The last time they lost three matches in a row was in 2012-2013 when they lost nine matches in a row.

Brett Kimmorley, the ex-league player, was seen at the Waratahs’ practice last week. Presumably, he was working on the Waratahs’ back-line moves and alignments. But he is not the person the Waratahs need to save their season.

There should be an urgent call to the Wallabies scrum doctor Mario Ledesma. Ledesma was instrumental in creating a splendid Waratahs scrumming machine when he was the scrum coach in 2014, the year of their Super Rugby glory.

If there is any glory to be achieved for the Waratahs this season, Ledesma needs to be brought back in again.

For the Waratahs, the simple truth is that no scrum means no Super Rugby 2016 glory. For the Reds, the simple truth is that only a scrum means no Super Rugby 2016 glory, either.

***

The Brumbies ran back the long opening kick-off from the Cheetahs, and almost scored a try as a result of their initiative.

In this sequence, one side running the ball from inside their 22 and the other intent on setting up a sort of defensive line inside the opposition 22, exposes the difference between Australian and New Zealand rugby and South African rugby.

Why did the Cheetahs kick long? Because they are essentially concerned about field position and working towards forcing penalties or perhaps exploiting a mistake by the Brumbies near their try line.

The point about the Cheetahs and the South African sides, with the exception of the Lions, is that they are not prepared to chance their arm with running plays, even when the opportunity is on, or even create the opportunity to run at the opposition.

The Brumbies and Crusaders, two overseas teams that won in South Africa over the weekend (rare events admittedly), were prepared to play for field position but – and this is the crucial point – when the chance arose to take on the defence with the ball in hand, both sides did this.

But listen to Sharks coach Gary Gold at half-time when the score was 7-7 and his side had kicked away virtually every ball his side won: “We need to keep hold of the ball.”

And what did the Sharks do in the second half when they got the ball? Kick it away again, just like the Cheetahs in their dire performance against the Brumbies.

Either the team (in this case the Sharks but it could be the Cheetahs) is not taking much notice of what the coach said, or, and this is perhaps the answer, the Sharks (like the Cheetahs in their match against the Brumbies) did not have a clue about what you have to do to make progress and score tries.

The lack of skill of South African backs and forwards, especially in their range of passing skills, is very obvious when their teams are exposed to good Australian and New Zealand sides. Somehow South African rugby has ignored or not understood lessons from the 2015 Rugby World Cup tournament – the All Blacks are transforming rugby into a passing, handling and kicking game.

But the emphasis is on the power of the passing and off-load game.

We saw this power in the opening moments of the Brumbies-Cheetahs match when the Brumbies did their usual exit play, a series of longish passes from the ruck on one sideline to the other sideline. A break was made. The Brumbies runners flooded through.

Joe Tomane was put into a gap by Scott Fardy. He broke through, put through a kick and the lively Argentinian and Brumbies halfback Tomas Cubelli fell on the ball for a try.

Enter the TMO. He showed shots of Scott Fardy seemingly passing the ball forward. In my view, the ball went backwards from Fardy’s hands and with the momentum of the run drifted forward. Technically this is not a forward pass.

But the neutral referee Glen Jackson acted on the TMO’s evidence and the try was disallowed. The point here, though, is the intent of the Brumbies in trying to score a try through slick and accurate passing.

Shortly after this, the impressive and solid Brumbies No.8 Ita Vaea went across for a try after David Pocock had snatched an intercept and then worked the ball away from the Cheetahs defence with a deft pass. More passing and hard running saw the Brumbies set up Vaea for his try.

The scoreline of 25-18 totally flattered the Cheetahs. They kicked a penalty right on time to give themselves a bonus point. But truth to say, they really should have been deducted a point for their poor effort.

There is one other point about how visiting teams can win in South Africa which both the Brumbies and the Crusaders demonstrated: take the referees and the TMOs out of affecting the outcome of the match by playing as much as you can in the opposition territory.

The point here is that there is no South African team that can effectively run the ball back, as the Brumbies and Crusaders can when they want to, from inside their own half.

The Sharks were the leading team in the tournament heading into this round yet they were clueless in trying to run the ball. They scored their tries from an intercept and when the Crusaders spilled a pass when setting up an attacking movement.

Because they were playing inside their own half for most of the match, the Sharks had limited shots at goal from penalties, usually their main source of points.

They could not even benefit from an extremely poor decision by referee Jaco Peyper and the TMO to sin-bin David Havili for an alleged shoulder charge when coming to the rescue of his teammate Andy Ellis who was being thugged and kneed (a sin bin offence surely?) by Andre Esterhuizen. Moments earlier, in the same section of play, Peyper had ruled that a head-high tackle by the Sharks was only a penalty!

Later in the match, under the Sharks’ posts, with the Crusaders down by two points, a Sharks shoulder charge was ignored. There was a stop in the play because of an injury. I noticed that the producers/TMO did not run the shoulder charge incident. I wonder why!

The point here is that by playing in the Sharks’ half 67 per cent of the game, the Crusaders ensured that the majority of shots at goal were kicked by them. They were unlucky that their young kicker Richie Mo’unga, otherwise an impressive No.10, failed to convert 11 points which would have given the Crusaders a handy rather than a close victory.

The Cheetahs have now lost their last six matches at Bloemfontein, their longest home turf losing streak.

One of the reasons for this poor record lies in the fact that their set piece is terrible. The scrum especially makes a mockery of the traditional South African mastery of the dark arts of the scrum.

The Cheetahs, averaging a success rate of 70 per cent, have the worst scrum in the Super Rugby tournament. They lose an average of two scrums a game. And they maintained this dire record against an admittedly good Brumbies scrumming pack.

To me, brought up as a youngster on the rugby writings of Danie Craven and the technical excellence and often dazzling attacking play of the Springboks, it remains a mystery why there is no evidence of bold strategic thinking with South African teams.

Instead of taking the Boer-dom out of South African rugby the end of apartheid, it has seemingly entrenched a laager-mentality game that ends up with players of great talent never fulfilling that talent, possibly because they are not allowed to express it.

Anyway, getting back to the Brumbies, they blew a chance of forcing the bonus point win against a side that really should not have got within seven points of them.

The point to make here is that the Brumbies are the one team in the Super Rugby tournament that attacks every opposition ruck. On the other extreme, the Highlanders hardly ever attack the opposition rucks.

The Brumbies’ method makes continuity play against them extremely difficult. But they do give away an inordinate number of penalties. They were perhaps lucky that the Cheetahs, perhaps because they were playing catch-up throughout the match, gave away a number of opportunities to kick goals.

Against this, though, the Brumbies concede on average less than two tries a match.

The Brumbies play the Chiefs in the standout match of the round next weekend. The Chiefs have a brilliant all-court game and it will be interesting to see if the Brumbies adjust their ‘everyone in at the rucks’ style to allow for the expansive game the Chiefs play.

Stephen Larkham is proving to be a thoughtful coach and the Brumbies will at least have a plan (that is a set of tactics, plays and methods) to beat the Chiefs, which is more than the Cheetahs had against the Brumbies.

There was some talk before this match, too, that the Brumbies might be distracted on the field with the off-field antics of their management. This doesn’t seem to be the case. But things might be different when they get back to Canberra and become more involved in a drama that seems to be bizarre.

The one thing that mystifies me is why the Brumbies management were allowed by the ARU to involve the federal police in whatever has happened or not happened.

My first job at The Sydney Morning Herald was covering state parliament in the era of the Wran Government. There is no doubt in my mind that Neville Wran was the most gifted politician in modern Australian history. He had a mantra: “You never hold a Royal Commission unless you know what the outcome of that commission will be.”

In other words, when you have a political problem you do not out-source its resolution if you want to control the outcome. This is politics 101. Now look at what the Brumbies management and the ARU have done. They have or believe they have a serious problem and have out-sourced its resolution to the federal police. Madness!

I can’t remember a time when Australian rugby at the ARU board level and at the Super Rugby level, with a couple of exceptions (NSW and the Rebels), is so poorly managed.

There is a serious case, especially at the ARU, for a clean-out of the board and a return of the game in Australia to people who actually know something about grassroots rugby.

***

We have had five rounds of Super Rugby 2016 and it seems as though a pattern is emerging in the Australasian Group. That pattern is the dominance of the New Zealand teams, aside from the Brumbies.

This weekend we had the Highlanders defeating the Rebels 27-3 at Melbourne. A week earlier, the Highlanders defeated the Waratahs at Sydney, 30-26, after leading 30-0 at one stage.

The Highlanders ended a two-match winning streak by the Rebels and checked their strong showing on the Australian Conference table where they had shared the lead with the Brumbies on 13 points.

The Highlanders are the defending champions and winning both of their Australian games is a terrific bonus to them in the Australasian Group.

Then we had the Chiefs monstering the Force 53-10 at Hamilton, after coming back from Japan. The feature of the match was the way the Chiefs ran away with the match in the second half.

The Hurricanes made harder work than they should have in defeating the Kings 42-20.

These three New Zealand teams also recorded bonus points for scoring three-plus tries. This system is growing on me, I must admit. What is obvious about it is that bonus points for try scoring is very much harder now than it was in the past.

This makes the three-plus tries win extremely valuable in the competition for points on the table.

The leading teams on the Australasian Group table currently read like this: Chiefs 19, Highlanders 18, Brumbies 17, Hurricanes 15, Crusaders 14, Rebels 13, Waratahs 10.

The way the finals positions are allocated is that the leading team in each conference wins a finals position. The Australasian Group therefore has two automatic finalists, the winner of the Australian Conference and the winner of the New Zealand Conference.

There are five finalists in the Australasian Group. The next three finalists come from the three remaining top teams in the Australasian Group.

Right now the Australasian finalists would be: Chiefs, Brumbies, Highlanders, Hurricanes, Crusaders.

Only the Waratahs, in my view, of the Australian teams can muscle their way into the finalists list. But having said that, it would have to be a Waratahs team that is playing much better than the side that struggled to defeat the Reds at Suncorp on Sunday.

So, in my view, there is a very real possibility of the Brumbies carrying the hopes of the Australian Conference into the 2016 Super Rugby finals.