The Wallabies were beaten by a gutsy Ireland, not by the referee

A win is a win and a loss, unfortunately for a brave, resilient and sometimes inaccurate Wallabies side, is always a loss.

The seemingly impossible dream of a 2016 Grand Slam is officially over.

Ireland were gutsy in their 27 – 24 victory. They were the better team for large portions of the Test.

When it mattered, towards the end of the Test, behind on the scoreboard and with many of their best players off the field, they summoned up their last reserves of energy and skills to score the winning try.

From near the touchline, Paddy Jackson booted over the conversion that meant the Wallabies had to score a try to win the Test.

This was one comeback too many for a gallant Wallabies side.

The Wallabies had came back from 17 – 0 down just before half-time to take the lead in the 68th minute before conceding a try, following eight phases of desperate attack and equally desperate defence, that took the score out to the final result, Ireland 27 – Australia 24.

Both sides scored three tries, all of them converted. But Ireland kicked two successful penalties to the one to the Wallabies which was booted over by a nerveless Bernard Foley.

Before we get to a discussion of Michael Cheika’s comments about the refereeing we need to pay tribute to both teams and their coaching staffs for a memorably dramatic, intense, and nerve-wracking Test.

We (I mean pundits like myself) are often critical about officials, players, coaches, the game itself, and its administrators. But every now again we should stand back from the politics of the game and give thanks for the modern game of rugby itself.

At its best, as it was at Aviva Stadium in Dublin, Test rugby provides a spectacle as brilliant and as enthralling as anything in sport anywhere can offer.

I call Test rugby of this vintage, Shakespeare on Gatorade.

During the Test the crowd was roaring when Ireland mounted their series of seemingly never-ending attacks. There were up to 17 phases in some of these early attacks. And when Ireland turned down relatively easy shots at goal to mount more attacking mauls near the Wallabies try line, these roars reached crescendos of sound.

Then when the Wallabies surged back into the Test in the second half, the crowd went silent.

It was the silence of a crowd whose voice had been stilled by a dread prospect that a victory that seemed to be so certain earlier on was now becoming less and less likely.

The final denouement of the Test, with Ireland taking the lead with a finely-worked series of rehearsed phase plays, saw the crowd roaring their team home with cheers and singing.

The modern game of rugby requires the players to have the minds of chess players who crash into each other doing grievous bodily harm on occasions.

The players have to remember all the moves and the possible variations that might be needed to be taken into account in the unfolding play while being battered and inflicting a battering on their opponents.

Gridiron players have the huddle after every play to work out their next response to how a game is going.

League players have the re-set of the play-the-ball to take stock of what to do next or what might present itself next.

When play flows from a start-up like a lineout, scrum or kick-off, rugby players are forced to make intricate decisions on the run for up to a couple of minutes at a time.

And they have to do this instantly while coping a book of laws that even QCs with plenty of time for their consideration would find difficult to deal with.

To change the metaphor, a rugby side in like an orchestra that has to play together in synchronisation without a conductor to hold all the various sections together.

When all this comes off, as it did for both sides at Dublin, from time to time and more for Ireland than the Wallabies, viewers at the ground and those of us who watched on our television sets get a sports experience that is memorable.

This bring us to Cheika’s complaint about referee Jerome Garces and the penalty count of 13 – 3 against the Wallabies.

To begin with, Cheika made his statement in a proper way and with the proper procedure in mind. So there should be no criticism of his complaint or the manner in which he delivered it.

Cheika told the media conference after the Test that he wanted a meeting with the World Rugby referees boss Alain Rolland. As he told the reporters:

“We have to do that (talking about decisions) with the refs mate. They’ve told us that we can’t talk about it in public because they don’t want interpretations being made public. That’s the edict they’ve given us and we can’t say anything about it.”

This is fair enough. Although Cheika did give a clue to what he wanted to talk about with Rolland when he complained about “a lack of consistency” from Jerome.

My guess is that Cheika is referring to the fact that the Wallabies were penalised on numerous occasions at the ruck while Ireland seemed to be indulging in the mayhem of the rucks in an impeccable way, according to Garces.

I watched the Test with the prior information that Garces had caned the Wallabies in the rucks. I must say that I agreed with virtually all of the decisions made by Garces.

To my mind, Ireland’s coach Joe Schmidt has done a terrific job in creating a group of forwards, aided by some brave backs on occasions, who have accurate techniques when it comes to contesting for the ball in the rucks.

My only caution to this praise is that occasionally the Irish players were allowed to place their hands ahead of the ball (a no no with a strict referee) when making their snatching.

A referee like South African Craig Joubert is very strict about penalising players who put their hands into rucks beyond the ball.

Most of the time, though, the Irish players were punctilious about rolling away and taking their hands off the ball if they were off their feet.

There was one time when Rory Best was caught on the wrong side of the ruck and Garces did not penalise him on the grounds, apparently, that he was there accidentally and was not preventing the Wallabies from playing the ball.

The Wallabies, on the other hand, were careless about the way they allowed themselves to be caught on the wrong side of the ruck. This happened on many occasions. They also contested for the ball off their feet and were, as a consequence, frequently penalised.

Despite this, there is always something that does not sit well when one side is penalised almost exclusively in a brutal match where both sides threw their bodies into the contact area with total disregard for the future health of their heads, shoulders and hips – and the laws, on occasions.

The penalty count was 8 – 1`in favour of Ireland at half-time. And 13 – 3 at full-time. This suggests a slight improvement on the part of the Wallabies in the second half, with its 5 – 2 count against them. But a 5 – 2 penalty count against a team is usually a losing equation.

I say Cheika is right to make inquiries as to the reasons why his team was so heavily penalised and why they were so unable to force Ireland into conceding penalties.

But he will find, I believe, that most of the penalties at the ruck were well-deserved.

In an early Test this year when Stephen Moore was contesting some similar decisions from the South African referee Jaco Peyper, he was told that the Wallabies were indulging in “high risk and high reward” tactics with their aggressive attitude to trying to turn over tackled ball.

And, because of this high-risk element in the Wallabies game, it is no surprise when they are on the wrong end of a penalty count against a team like Ireland that is possibly the best-drilled side in world rugby right now when it comes to making a contest at the ruck.

Cheika, I think, needs to consider whether he continues with the high risk attack on the opposition’s ball at rucks.

On the big decision of the Test, the yellow card against Dean Mumm, the referee, TMO and assistant referee Nigel Owens made the correct decision.

In the discussion of the incident between the assistant referees and Garces you could hear Owens saying: “You are looking at a yellow card rather than a red.”

Garces then makes the point that the incident was “not dynamic” enough to warrant a red card.

Right at the end of the Test, when a frustrated Bernard Foley did a similar sort of tip tackle on an Irish forward, Garces immediately gave him a yellow card.

Both yellow cards were inevitable, once the tip-tackle had been made.

There was an occasion, too, when the crowd was baying for David Pocock to be penalised when he stood virtually as first receiver in the Ireland back line to receive a pass from Conor Murray, Ireland’s half back.

The crowd was wrong and Garces was right. The ball was out of the scrum/ruck and as Garces explained to a bewildered Ireland player, “there is no offside line.”

The controversial scrum penalty at the end of the match, which denied the Wallabies one last chance to snatch a win, came after several collapsed scrums. The first collapsed scrum seemed to forced on Ireland by the Wallabies.

The next two scrums saw Ireland pushing forward. And this is why Ireland finally got their crucial scrum penalty.

In my view, this was a Test that was possibly lost or the winning result compromised for the Wallabies before it started.

Why did coach Cheika drop Lopeti Timani, not only from the starting side but even from the reserves?

The back row of Hooper, Pocock and Timani was the best-balanced and most successful the Wallabies have fielded all season.

Timani provided the surging power on smashing through with the hard yards with his carries and making the effective tackles, power the Wallabies lacked against Ireland.

Why Timani wasn’t selected against Ireland is a mystery given his impact in the two previous Grand Slam Tests.

This lack of power from the forwards without Timani was accentuated by a reluctance to use Rory Arnold as a runner. Kane Douglas, when he replaced Arnold, actually made some dents in the Ireland defensive wall, admittedly.

The Wallabies sorely missed Adam Coleman, the Wallabies equivalent of New Zealand’s Brodie Retallick.

It is no accident, in my opinion, that Ireland’s victories over the Wallabies and the All Blacks came when these two big (make that huge) second rowers, Coleman and Retallick, did not play against them. Without them on the field, Ireland were able to contain the other runners at the Chicago and Dublin (against Australia) Tests.

And the obvious back-up to this assertion is why-oh-why did Cheika play Dean Mumm as a starter?

Mumm won a lineout or two but was guilty of the madness of giving away a yellow card. While he was off the field, Ireland scored 10 points, finally turning their dominance of possession and position into points.

He contributed very little around the field, as well.

My guess, too, is that Michael Hooper, who was used as a jumper from time to time, won about as many lineouts as Mumm.

The point is that Mumm is at this late stage in his career, at best, a reserve. And only a reserve. Time and time again, he has been proved to be lacking in the power and strength that a starting loose forward needs to have in the modern game.

We get back to Cheika as a selector here. In my mind, this is his greatest weakness as a coach. He has a tendency to over-trust older players and to under-trust younger players.

It would help the Wallabies a great deal if someone like Bob Dwyer or Rod Macqueen, both coaches with a good records as selectors, were brought into the Wallaby camp as an outside selector, in a role that Grant Fox plays with the All Blacks.

So the Wallabies won’t win a second Gand Slam in 2016.

The major problem with the Wallabies throughout this season and it was apparent once more against Ireland is that the front five are not hard enough to dominate the opposition at the gain line.

While Coleman was playing, this hardness problem was not so apparent. But even with him, there was a certain softness in the front five when the going got really rough.

There was the problem, too, of playing two number sevens which exacerbated the Wallabies lineout woes.

But having said all this, it is true that the Wallabies are a better side now than they were at the start of the season. There is cause for some muted optimism about 2017.

Ireland, on the other hand, have had one of their most successful years ever. They are the first Northern Hemisphere side since England’s great team in 2003 (their finest ever?) to beat the Southern Hemisphere powers, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia in the same year.

They are the only Ireland side since 1905 to defeat the All Blacks.

Ireland and England must now be reckoned the contenders for the number two position on the World Rugby ranking and ultimately, perhaps, the best placed sides to knock the All Blacks off the top shelf.

At Twickenham next weekend, the Wallabies have a chance to come back into these sorts of calculations when they play a rampant England side that defeated the Pumas 27 – 14 despite playing for most of the Test with 14 players and for 10 minutes with 13 players.

Redemption is the great salve of wounded pride for defeated teams.

If the Wallabies beat England next weekend this spring tour of the north will be hailed as a great achievement, even though the Grand Slam is not part of the triumphs.