Can anyone challenge the All Blacks?

“Are Australia and South Africa moving in the right direction?”

That was the searching question posed by Graham Henry when I met him last week in Cardiff. He was on his way back home after a short consultancy role with Irish province Leinster, and he’d stopped off in the Welsh capital to meet some friends.

‘Ted’ doesn’t have any axes to grind in semi-retirement, but he is genuinely worried about the future of the international game. He expressed his concern about the state of play in Australia and South Africa and the downward spiral of playing standards in both countries.

The first fixture of the 2016 Rugby Championship did nothing to suggest that the rest of the world will be able to topple New Zealand rugby from its lofty pedestal. On that evidence, they will be lucky to even cause a wobble in the coming months.

Their great strength lies in cohesion, both on and off the field. Off the field, like England, they have a clear rule in place with respect to player movement to Europe or Japan – if you’re plying your trade abroad, you can forget about playing for the All Blacks.

They do not pretend they have the player base to sustain more than five Super Rugby franchises, thus avoiding the problem of dilution of talent. The five-team structure in New Zealand has been the same ever since 1996, so there has been no change in 20 years.

Back in the Super 12 competition in 1996, there were four South African and three Australian franchises in the tournament, and that was about right. The teams added since then have recorded the following results:

The Force and Cheetahs both joined Super Rugby in 2006, the Rebels were added in 2011 and the Kings in 2013.

It’s also interesting to see what’s happened internationally in those two periods, firstly from 1996-2006 and secondly then from 2007-2016. The results between New Zealand and South Africa have remained the same, with the All Blacks recording a 71.4 per cent win rate in both periods. Against Australia however, New Zealand’s win ratio has shot up from 61.5 per cent to 82.1 per cent from 2007 onwards. That’s an increase of over 20 per cent.

The outflow of Australian and South African rugby talent to European clubs really became a gusher after the 2011 World Cup. Since 2012, the All Blacks have won seven out of their eight games with South Africa, and eight out nine against the Wallabies (with two draws). So to answer Ted’s question, things are clearly heading in the wrong direction.

In Australia and South Africa, Pandora’s box has already been opened and playing talent haemorrhaged to European and Japanese clubs, while the remaining player base has been spread far too thinly in the name of ‘development’.

In New Zealand, the lid has been nailed shut by the policy of not selecting overseas-based players, and not expanding speculatively in the Super Rugby tournament. Where the Kiwi rugby environment remains taut, competitive and progressive, among its two strongest traditional rivals it is lax and stagnating.

To lose by 42 points to 8 and six tries to one in Sydney, in front of your own people, marks a new and more damaging stage in the process.(Click to Tweet)

During the 2016 Super Rugby season, Australian teams won three out of their 25 contests with New Zealand sides, and they lost them by an average margin of 18 points to 35. The New Zealand franchises won going away, with the average score even higher in the second half of the season at 16-37. The losing margin at international level on Saturday was even bigger than that.

With its smaller playing base, Australia relies on success at international level to hold the ship together, but the Wallabies no longer have the magic powder to dispel all the problems underneath them.

As surely as the Super Rugby season demonstrated that five Australian franchises are one or two too many to be truly competitive, so the first game of the Rugby Championship has shown that the 60-cap rule (for European-based players) is no good for the long-term development of the national team.

Correct selection is consistent selection. It is not enough for experience to visit and play guest for a couple of months a year – and I don’t for a moment doubt either the sincere intentions of, or the ‘value added’ by the European-based players. They need to come back home, wipe their feet on the mat, and stay for good.

All the members of the Wallaby family need to be ‘in residence’ for Australia to rise again, and this attitude needs to be enshrined in a new ARU ruling as definite as the one in New Zealand, or England.

I had thought that the return of the European-based players would stiffen Wallaby resolve, and stood a chance to rebuild the accuracy of key aspects of play back to World Cup 2015 type levels. I was wrong.

Although they were two of Australia’s better performers on the night, neither Will Genia nor Adam Ashley-Cooper had enough thumbs to stick in every leaky dyke, and poor Matt Giteau (probably the most important addition of the three) hobbled off in only the 11th minute of the game and was unable to play the crucial role assigned to him. His replacements, Matt Toomua and Rob Horne fared no better.

As a result, the single most critical aspect of the match, the Wallabies’ ability to exit from their own territory without offering the All Blacks’ kick return game too many opportunities, fell to pieces entirely.

Last week I observed in my summary that:

In the third Test against England in June, the decisive factor was the impact of the England kick-return game against the Australian exit strategy. Off four kick-returns, England harvested 17 points and one other line-break that could have led to a try. The Wallaby kicking game from their own end was unable to avoid England’s main return man, Brown, and neither Phipps at 9 nor Toomua at 12 were effective support kickers to Foley.

Against New Zealand, it was not so much a case of déjà vu as a looping, living nightmare in which the same errors were repeated again and again.

In the course of the match, the All Blacks:
• scored 22 points and four tries directly off Wallaby exits,
• had two more tries disallowed (potentially 36 points total),
• blocked down three clearing kicks, and
• forced four fumbles or turnovers on attempted exit runbacks by the Wallabies.

Let’s take a look at the grisly evidence.

Things did not start promisingly for the Australian exit strategy, with Bernard Foley ballooning his first clearance kick at 4:27 no further than the Wallaby 22 line. The snapshot of Foley’s body-angle – leaning back at the moment of contact – suggests that the ball will achieve more height than distance:

Drift wood floating underwater
Australia managed to turn the ball over at a breakdown from the following lineout, giving Giteau the opportunity to use his left foot to clear to the left touch-line.

The kick wasn’t a great one. With its low trajectory cutting down chase time, receiver Ben Smith had about 25 metres between himself and the pursuit when he fielded the ball at 5:21.

Ultimately the kick was not the real problem however. In the snapshot at 5:32…

…as Beauden Barrett turned to make the second pass, the Wallabies had numbered up, with six defenders opposite six All Black attackers. The distribution was also acceptable, with three backs, two tight forwards, and one loose forward defending a 4/1/1 split on the All Black side.

This is a situation, therefore, that the Wallabies should be defending very comfortably if they maintain their communication and their discipline.

The problem occurs as New Zealand look to boil down their attacking width to a two-on-one overlap, with Kieran Read and Ryan Crotty facing Wallaby wing Dane Haylett-Petty:

Read does his job superbly, angling back slightly onto Haylett-Petty’s inside shoulder and preserving the space outside for Crotty. Unfortunately, the sequence also highlights Haylett-Petty’s inexperience as a defending wing.

At 5:33 he is turned out, waiting to push off on to Crotty. His priority here is to ‘trust the drift’, allowing the inside defender to help out and above all, avoiding an entanglement with Read, which would cut Crotty loose down the sideline. This is especially true given Read’s proven world-leading quality at releasing the end attacker on the most favourable of terms.

In the second and third images, David Pocock has Read covered and it is time for Haylett-Petty to push off on to Crotty, but he delays a split-second too long, becomes embroiled with the All Black captain, and his desperate lunge gets fended off by Crotty.

The All Black #12 does remarkably well to finish with two other defenders still to beat, but in the Wallabies’ defensive records this would count as a very soft try.

Kick-blocks and the focus on Foley
With Giteau leaving the field in the 11th minute and his replacement Matt Toomua only lasting until the 31st, and the Wallabies seemingly unwilling to use Genia as an exit option, the All Blacks were free to load up on Foley in all likely kicking scenarios.

At 30:52, Jerome Kaino is free to rush Foley with only Hooper and Horne, two non-kickers, outside him. The situation was repeated early in the second half:

This time, Aaron Cruden applied the pressure and half-blocked the kick. Again, there’s no kicking alternative to help dilute the pressure on the Wallaby number 10.

“When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers”
Even when Australia did get the kick and the chase right, there was an ugly squall of sheer bad luck lurking just out of sight.

At 37:48 Foley calls “Chase!” and puts up an accurate high kick, which Ashley-Cooper pursues effectively down the left, creating a hole for Pocock to turn over possession at the subsequent breakdown (37:58).

At this point the Wallabies have assembled one of their two usual forward pods in midfield (the front row unit of Scott Sio, Stephen Moore and Sekope Kepu), in readiness to take the ball up from the expected turnover, shaped for attack on next phase.

When Aaron Smith unexpectedly gets a tip on the ball to deflect it back on the All Blacks side, Barrett suddenly finds a huge target area opening up in front of him at 38:06, and takes the gap between Moore and Kepu, before setting up Waisake Naholo for the score.

It was truly a shower, not a sprinkle of misfortune!

Switching to the runback (second half)
Facing a 32-3 deficit at halftime, the Wallabies tried to run the ball out of their own last third in the second period.

As the following reel illustrates, this change in policy was not a notable improvement:

Again there are passing inaccuracies, from Foley to Ashley-Cooper on the switch at 41:03, from Moore to Hooper (faced by a line of New Zealand backs) at 51:18, and handling errors, by Tevita Kuridrani at 55:25.

All of these examples handed the All Blacks the kind of unstructured counter-attack scenarios they value so highly, for free.

Why can’t the Wallabies kick the ball?
The sequence at the beginning of the reel (from the first half) shows a typical run of events in the kicking game. After each successive kick – by Foley at 18:31, by Haylett-Petty at 18:48, and finally Israel Folau at 19:04 – the Wallabies’ situation measurably deteriorates as that of the All Blacks’ improves.

Even though the Kiwis don’t reclaim either of the high kicks they launch, the feeling that Australia will make a mistake, given enough ‘punts’ at the ball, persists.

Eventually, Folau’s attempted exit is blocked down and New Zealand go on to convert their other disallowed try, finished appropriately enough by the original blocker of the relieving kick, Brodie Retallick.

Summary
The Wallabies cannot do anything about either the drain of playing talent to Europe, or the structure of a Super Rugby tournament in which they are committed to fielding five franchises. But in the long term, their administration can and should remedy the issues arising from both situations.

When I told Graham Henry that my latest article on The Roar had been about the Wallabies exit strategy he replied, “Is their kicking game good enough? You may have to write another one next week!”

And here I am, writing another one.

There is only so much you can turn around in one week. But if Michael Cheika and his coaching group can produce a better kicking game from their own territory and pick a better lineout, they will be far more competitive in Wellington. By rights, the gap should not be as wide as it appeared in Sydney.

Adam Coleman at 4 and Scott Fardy restored to 6 would be two easy improvements, while Drew Mitchell would help the kicking game from either left wing or fullback. Bernard Foley looks weary and I suspect he needs a rest, so Quade Cooper at 10 and Reece Hodge at 12 should now come into the mix in midfield. I also hope Kyle Godwin is at least added to the squad as cover.