SPIRO: Why not appoint Mark Ella as the Wallabies' attack coach?

Eddie Jones is not as stupid as he sounds. Proof? He has just appointed Glen Ella as England’s skills coach, responsible for developing England’s attacking play.

This is a smart appointment. Jones realises that England’s smash-bash-penalty kick style won’t move his team into the top tier category. This limited style won the 2007 Rugby World Cup for the Springboks. But rugby has moved on towards the Total Rugby game espoused by the All Blacks.

This Total Rugby game has won successive Rugby World Cup tournaments for the All Blacks, after a 24-year gap. And the indications from this year’s Super Rugby tournament, with the general dominance of the New Zealand teams, is that teams will have match this Total Rugby approach to win the Super Rugby tournament and, at the Test, level to win the various international series.

This is not to suggest that England or Australia or South Africa should adopt every aspect of the New Zealand game.

England and South African teams have a special physicality in their forward play that often gives them an advantage. It makes sense for the coach of England, say, to maintain this physicality but build other dimensions to his team’s play around this.

The point here is that Total Rugby as played by England and South African teams, with their forward power, will be different from Total Rugby played by Australian and New Zealand teams, with their athleticism in the forwards and backs and traditional emphasis on smart, attacking play.

When he announced the appointment of Glen Ella, Jones noted that his former Randwick club mate “brings with him a wealth of experience, but also has one of the best attacking minds in the business.”

One of the changes that Glen Ella will surely make is introduce the Randwick system of a flat back-line alignment, quick hands in transferring the ball from player to player, players standing relatively close to each other and taking the ball to the line and incessant backing up.

It will be interesting to see how much influence Glen Ella will have in the relatively short time he has with the England squad.

Daryl Gibson, the Waratahs coach, a player and coach in the Crusaders’ method of Total Rugby (which is slightly different from, say, the Chiefs’ method), has pushed Israel Folau up from fullback to the centres where his size, strength and power make him a formidable breaker of the structured defensive lines.

At fullback, Folau was somewhat hindered by the requirements of having to link up with wingers or having to decide whether to kick and which type of kick, the long raking punt to touch or the high ball, to use.

Gibson, too, is trying to take Michael Cheika’s mechanical “playing by numbers” style out of the Waratahs’ game and trying to get the players to adopt a fundamental principle of the New Zealand Total Rugby system of players “playing what is in front of them.”

Robbie Deans tried to do the same thing with his Wallaby sides. But the players would not or could not adapt. They had been coached from primary school days in the “playing by numbers” method and could not break this bad (in modern rugby terms) habit.

Michael Cheika ditched this Deans method of “playing what is in front you” for an admittedly sophisticated “playing by numbers” method.

This method brought success to the Waratahs in winning their first Super Rugby tournament in 2014. And the Wallabies also exceeded expectations at the 2015 Rugby World Cup tournament by reaching the final.

But we should not kid ourselves about the way the final played itself out. The Wallabies were on a hiding, a blow-out of a defeat, until Ben Smith was given a yellow card. The Wallabies clawed back 14 points against the 14 All Blacks. But once Smith returned to the play the All Blacks dominance in every aspect of the match was restored.

This dominance was predicated by the fact that the All Blacks were able to read every (predictable) attacking play mounted by the Wallabies.

We have seen the same thing happen between the Australian and New Zealand teams in this year’s Super Rugby tournament.

The drubbings that the Chiefs and the Crusaders inflicted on the Brumbies, for instance, foreshadow a similar series of drubbings from the All Blacks if the Wallabies do not start energising their attacking play with some unpredictability.

The way to do this, in my opinion, is for Michael Cheika to copy Eddie Jones and bring in Mark Ella, one of the great attacking players and thinkers about the game, into the Wallabies camp as the attack coach.

Mark Ella (along with his brother Glen Ella) was schooled in the Randwick method which is based, essentially, on a mastery of the basic skills of catching, drawing-an-opponent and passing to put a runner into space.

I watched all the Australian teams closely on the weekend and tried to envisage this exercise through the eyes of Mark Ella. He would see, I suggest, a number of problems.

Problem One: All the teams adopted what I call as step-ladder alignment with the backs from lineouts, scrums and often in general play. The result in most instances was that after a series of phases the attackers often had not even reached the advantage line.

I pause here to reiterate Spiro’s Law 1: The team that wins the battle of the advantage line will usually win the game.

The current step-ladder back-line alignment of the Australian sides makes it extremely difficult for these sides to win the battle of the advantage line because too much of their play is behind the advantage line.

Rod Kafer pointed out in his commentary of the Brumbies match that the home side was often so frustrated at playing well behind the advantage line that they kicked the ball away for want of something better to do with it.

Problem Two: The Australian teams invariably pass the towards the chest and stomach of their runners rather than slightly in front of them. This method, it must be coached because all the teams do it, slows down attacks as the runner has to almost stop to allow the ball to be gathered in.

In turn, this stop-start sort of attack, in contrast with the New Zealand method of runners flowing on to the ball, means that the Australian backs (in general) are relatively easy picking when trying to mount a decisive attack.

Nick Phipps is the worst offender in the pass to the stomach method, a reason why he should be replaced as the Wallabies starting half-back, in my opinion.

Problem Three: The passing itself by the Australian sides, especially from the halfbacks, rarely put a runner into a gap. Compare, for example, the play of Aaron Smith with his silky little pop-ups to put big forwards into holes around the edges of the ruck and the long, flat pass going past three runners sometimes to put a forward or back into a hole, with Australian halfbacks laboured shovelling of the ball.

The Randwick halves, from the great Ken Catchpole through to Brad Burke, passed in the Smith mode, with quickness of the ground and with a quick, snappy, shortish delivery.

Problem Four: The Australian method of “playing by numbers” virtually forces halfbacks, say, to wait over the ball from rucks until the numbers arrive and are set for the next phased play.

I call this the Emperor Penguin technique of halfback play with the player virtually waiting to hatch the next play.

Now compare this with the New Zealand system where the halfback clears the ball immediately, if not sooner in the case of Aaron Smith, to runners whether forwards or backs who all seem to have the ability to catch-and-pass in the Randwick method to give continuity and context to the attack.

How many Australian forwards, for instance, have the soft (five-eighths) hands of Brodie Retallick, or Sam Whitelock, or Wyatt Crockett?

The reason why I nominate Mark Ella as the Wallabies’ attack coach, therefore, is because the national side needs someone who understands the principles of the modern attacking game from a playing and theoretical basis.

Those of us of a certain age still treasure those memories of sunny Saturday afternoons down at Coogee Oval with the Galloping Greens in rampant mode and master manipulator of Randwick method, Mark Ella, setting all the attacks up, seeing like a rugby equivalent of a chess master, how play was going to eventuate four or five plays into the future of the sequence.

That was Mark Ella the player. In Saturday’s The Australian we had a terrific insight into Mark Ella the theorist/coach of the Total Rugby method.

The key to understanding the importance of the article as far as Michael Cheika and the Wallabies are concerned (and the Australian Super Rugby coaches) is this profound insight: “While the New Zealand teams all have various strengths, their use of the ball is a common feature of their play. But what unites the Kiwi teams the most does not appear on the stats sheet, that is their ability to attack off turnover ball.”

Then this equally profound insight: “Australian rugby is lost in the fog of the late 1990s and early 2000s and the patterned style of play coached by Rod Macqueen at the Wallabies and Eddie Jones at the Brumbies. At the time this style of play was brilliant and innovative, but it is now passe. Unfortunately, it is ingrained in Australian rugby from the Wallabies down to the juniors, who follow the imaginary grid on the field like a map.”

Constant readers of The Roar will know that I have espoused similar views to these from time to time.

So far this year (as Mark Ella pointed out) Australian teams have won just two matches against New Zealand opponents. One of those matches was in the first round when the Brumbies, looking like tournament champions admittedly as the start of the race, thrashed the Hurricanes at Canberra 52-10.

At the weekend, the Crusaders maintained this New Zealand dominance over Australian teams with an emphatic 38-5 thrashing of the Reds at Christchurch.

More Ella statistics (valid before last weekend’s match): The Hurricanes are the leading team in ball-carries and metres gained in a match: the Crusaders lead in off-loads: the Blues lead in the number of passes made and rucks won.

The only categories where an Australian team leads is in rucks lost (the Western Force) and yellow cards handed out (the Reds).

The significance of all this is that the way the finals series works is that the South African Group have two home quarter-finals going to the leaders in Africa Conference 1 and 2. The next South African side with the most number of points on the ladder gets a wild card entry.

The Australasian Group has five finalists, with the leading team from the Australian Conference and the New Zealand Conference having an automatic home quarter-final. The three wild cards go to the team, from either conference, with the most number of points on the ladder.

In my opinion, it is most likely that only one Australian team and four New Zealand teams will go on to the finals.

Which will that Australian team be? Either the Brumbies (currently on 25 points), the Waratahs (25), the Rebels (23).

To put some context on this, all five New Zealand teams are ahead of the Rebels on the table and the top four sides are ahead of the Brumbies and Waratahs: Crusaders (37), Chiefs (37), Highlanders (32), Hurricanes (31) and Blues (24).

Next Friday night see the Brumbies playing the Rebels at Melbourne. This is a must-win match for both sides, particularly for the Brumbies who have a bye they have to take.

The Waratahs play the Bulls at Sydney on Saturday night. They were unimpressive, I thought, in defeating the Cheetahs, a side that curiously for a South African side had had two successive wins at Sydney.

The best aspect of the Waratahs performance was their scrum. This will be important when they play the Bulls at Sydney on Saturday night.

The Hurricanes play the Reds at Wellington, a difficult and important match for them given the fact that they have to fly back from South Africa where they were defeated comfortably by the Sharks.

The Highlanders play the Crusaders at Dunedin, a game that is more important for the Highlanders in the grand scheme of things than the Crusaders.

The Chiefs have a bye.

If the Hurricanes defeat the Reds, as they probably should, the chances of four New Zealand finalists will be virtually set in cement.

The Brumbies have to play only one New Zealand team, the Blues.

The Rebels have to play the Chiefs and the Crusaders.

The Waratahs have to play the Crusaders, the Chiefs, the Hurricanes and the Blues.

My fearless prediction, based on the New Zealand teams dominance over their Australian rivals this year, is that the Brumbies will be the winners of the Australian Conference.