Hurricanes take home the title, show the way for the Wallabies

Hurricanes 20 – Lions 3 in an epic grand final to conclude the Super Rugby 2016 season with a home victory to the best team in the tournament.

All the New Zealand teams in the Super Rugby tournament have now won a title.

In bitter cold, with slanting rain and erratic gusts of wind creating nightmarish conditions for running rugby, the Hurricanes and the Lions battled out an intense contest where both sides showed a propensity to play with energy and skill.

But two moments of Lions’ panic, which were matched by remarkable Hurricanes sure-handed finishing, turned the final into a local victory.

Cory Jane plucked a kick-through almost as it was launched, controlled the greasy ball on his thigh and then fended off a covering tackle to cross over on the burst for the Hurricanes first try.

Then deep into the second half, the Hurricanes forced an uncontrolled tap back from a Lions defensive lineout. The Hurricanes forwards poured through on the slippery, elusive ball. The ball somehow was forced back into the Lions in-goal area.

Then there was a slashing burst of yellow as Beauden Barrett, the man of the match, burst through the ruck of chasing players to slither across to make the crucial touch-down. Electric magic!

Jane’s hands, either catching high balls, cross-field kicks or the miracle slips-catch to set up his try, have been the outstanding feature of his play. These skills have been developed as an integral part of the skills-based approach that New Zealand rugby coaches, at all levels, have been implementing. Jane is a stand-out, along with many other of his teammates and other players in the different franchises.

There is a lesson here for Australian rugby. You need to concentrate on coaching the skills if you want players to use them in the heat of play.

Barrett’s play, especially in the finals, has taken him to a level of five-eighth’s play that has been matched in recent years only by Dan Carter.

Admittedly, he knows the Wellington conditions well. But knowing the conditions and having the skills and the nerve to adjust your kicks, long and short, time your passes and then make the occasional telling break, which he did from under his posts towards the end of the final to turn the momentum finally and irrevocably towards the Hurricanes, are entirely different matters.

Attack got the Hurricanes to the 2016 Super Rugby finals, as it did in 2015. But defence, awesome, accurate, physical and unrelenting won them the grand final in 2016.

The defence was based on strong set piece play, especially the lineouts, and a rush-defence that created a virtually impregnable defensive line.

The three points scored by the Lions, the best attacking team in Super Rugby 2016, was the lowest tally of any team in a grand final.

The Hurricanes also did not concede a single try in their three finals. No side has ever done this before. It is unlikely that any side will ever do this again.

Another word of warning for the Wallabies here. There have been suggestions in the New Zealand media that the Hurricanes have been trialling a new defensive system that the All Blacks coaching staff have developed.

Who knows? What we do know is that after the Hurricanes’ All Blacks came back from their Tests against Wales they had far more intent and purpose, especially with their rush defence system, than they did earlier in the season.

Certainly the rush defence, led by Ardie Savea and Brad Shields, overwhelmed all their finals opponents, including two likely South African teams.

If I were Michael Cheika, I would be putting in place special tactics for the Wallabies play-makers to help them cope and then defeat a furious All Blacks wall of unrelenting rush defence directed towards runners during the Sydney Test on August 20.

Admittedly, all three finals played by the Hurricanes were in Wellington under wet, windy, cold conditions that were not conducive to expansive, try-scoring rugby.

Rod Kafer has a theory that has some merit, I believe, that these conditions favour the sides with high skills rather than being an equaliser and dragging both the sides down to a lowest common skills denominator.

There is no doubt that much of the Hurricanes play, even when they drove the ball up relentlessly at close quarters, was of a high standard of efficiency and skill. You would not think that this was a team that started its 2016 campaign with a 52-10 thrashing at Canberra at the hands and fast feet of a Brumbies side that suggested it could go all the way to finals glory in 2016.

There should be some hard thinking at the Brumbies and within the Wallabies camp about why the Hurricanes campaign ended in such triumph after such a disastrous start: and why the Brumbies campaign ended so sourly in the quarter-final with a loss to the Highlanders.

The behaviour of coach Stephen Larkham in blaming the Australian referee Angus Gardner, who ran the touchline in the grand final, for the Brumbies loss needs to be examined.

Last week his assistant coach, Dan McKellar was fined by SANZAAR $10,000, with $5000 of that suspended for the next 12 months, for using “crude and insulting language toward the Match Referee.”

The referee was Angus Gardner. Apparently McKellar abused Gardner, in front of a number of witnesses, after the Brumbies-Highlanders quarter-final.

Compare this reaction by the Brumbies coaches to the composed and intelligent response of the Lions camp after their loss to the Hurricanes on Saturday night.

Johan Ackermann, a most impressive coach and person, conceded that “we can probably debate the Jaguares game.”

But the Lions, he suggested, should have been “good enough” to get at least a point out of the game, which would have given them a hone final.

“If you asked me in January, will you play a final of Super Rugby even if it’s in Wellington, I’d take it with open hands and I’d take it again next year.”

This is a mature response from a coach who understands that the trick of winning finals is to get into them.

And then there was captain Warren Whiteley’s comments about the “masterclass” from Beauden Barrett and the concession that “tactically they were a bit smarter than we were on the day and they made use of their opportunities.”

The Hurricanes played with a passion and a calculation that winning teams need to convert into triumphs. Victor Vito, playing his 100th and last game for the Hurricanes said that the team dedicated the victory to the former Hurricanes great Jerry Collins who was killed in a car accident in France last year.

“In the background, Jerry was a big motivation. But if we got too lost in trying to do it for Jerry and forgot our basic task, which was to get off the line and smack them (then it wouldn’t have worked)… Jerry would have been proud simply because of the systems we put in place.”

Dane Coles, an inspirational captain, made the point, as well, that “to finally bring a championship to the Hurricanes franchise is just awesome. I’m just so proud of the group, not just the players who played but the management and all the guys who wore that strip.”

Passion plus execution of a winning game plan is the template that emerges from these shrewd comments. And an acknowledgment that a successful team embraces the players of the past, the current players and the players to come.

A successful team is part of a continuum. It should not be a full stop, the end of the line.

That continuum must embrace the fact that the current participants need to acknowledge that they have their days in the sun (or more likely in rugby, the wet and rain) and then they move on to allow the team to evolve with other players and so on, and so on…