England 37-21 Wallabies: Eddie Jones has last laugh over Michael Cheika

Eddie Jones has won the battle of the clowns over Michael Cheika with England’s emphatic 37 – 21, four tries to two, victory over Australia at Twickenham.

The last laugh in what was a nasty (because of Jones’ taunting) verbal battle between two rugby coaches who played together with Randwick’s Galloping Greens in the 1980s has gone to Jones, the gnomish, acid-tongued master coach of an England side that remains unbeaten in 2016.

With four more victories required to equal the All Blacks’ 18 consecutive Test wins, this England side has improved significantly this year, despite carrying many of the tragics from the failed 2015 Rugby World Cup campaign.

It is now being measured against Clive Woodward’s Incomparable 2003 Rugby World Cup-winning side, the best England side in modern times.

Jones won the coaching battle with Cheika, on and off the field.

Very simply, England came out with a game plan to force errors from the Wallabies with high balls from Ben Youngs, a great chase and then putting the defence under pressure by stretching it with off-loading, quick recycling and bringing the wingers into play as often as possible.

The Wallabies game essentially was to keep ball in hand for every attack. England were able to put up a strong defensive wall with hardly any defenders behind it. The Wallabies never chip-kicked into the vacant spaces, never tried the long kick-pass to force gaps in the defensive wall.

The attack was predictable and once the energy went out of the Wallabies legs was easily contained.

The problems for the Wallabies started before the Test and escalated during it.

Cheika made a mistake, for instance, in not turning up to the legitimate conference set up between Jones and the South African referee Jaco Peyper. He should have at least heard what Jones was telling Peyper about the scrums, especially his comments on the legality of the scrumming his prop, Dan Cole.

The penalty count favoured the Wallabies in the first half of the Test. But in the second half, this was reversed. This may have been a reflection of the relative domination of the Wallabies in the first half and England in the second half.

But the implied discourtesy to Peyper by Cheika’s refusal to join Jones in a discussion about how the Test was going to be refereed was a stupid act by the Wallaby coach.

Why? Because it did not allow Peyper a chance to explain to Cheika, person to person, what his views were on the scrums, the rucks and mauls, offside play and fair play.

I have a suspicion that this discourtesy on the part of Cheika may have been a factor, sub-consciously of course, in some of the important decisions in the Test going against the Wallabies.

There was an obvious knock-on when Marland Yarde was awarded his try. How Peyper allowed himself to be talked into allowing this from the TMO who claimed that Yarde’s hand was on the ball at all times in the grounding (when it clearly wasn’t) is beyond me.

And how Dane Haylett-Petty’s late tackle (with Mike Brown taking a supposedly illegal dive) could result in a yellow card, too, was inexplicable.

The TMO claimed that Haylett-Petty had been warned previously about a shoulder charge. But this alleged infringement did not warrant a penalty, apparently. How it could have been relevant to the yellow card incident is, again, beyond my understanding.

There was a worrying symmetry about the Twickenham Test, the last of four in 2016 between the two teams.

At Brisbane, the first Test of the series, the Wallabies opened quickly and looked like they would over-run a perplexed and mistake-ridden England side.

The Wallabies made the same sort of start at Twickenham. After 15 minutes with 10 points on the board and a couple of times crossing England’s try line without being able to ground the ball, the Wallabies looked set for a handsome victory.

At Brisbane, England slowly came back into the match by forcing some penalties and then in the second clinched the Test.

The same thing happened at Twickenham. The Wallabies came out storming into England’s territory and looked like setting up a cricket score opening salvo. Several tries were almost but not-quite completed. And like Brisbane, England slowly came back into the game with successful penalty kicks.

At Twickenham, however, England ran away with the Test in the second half.

The loss at Brisbane saw a Test was thrown away by careless play by the Wallabies and poor selection.

The loss at Twickenham was a a repeat performance by the Wallabies. The Cheika tendency for poor selections were continued. Moreover, the Wallabies ability to think their way through crises on the field in the way England, Ireland and the All Blacks have done this year, was again not apparent.

The Wallabies have been given a simplistic game of running the ball with few variations of running lines. There seems to be no tactical awareness on the part of the coaches or the players that when the game plan is not working that it needs to be tweaked.

This simplistic game plan is supported or more properly subverted by Cheika continuing to make poor selections.

Take four examples of poor selection: Scott Sio at prop ahead of Tom Robertson. Nick Phipps at halfback ahead of Nick Frisby. Playing Israel Folau as a roving fullback rather than putting him on the wing, moving Dane Haylett-Petty into fullback. The continuation of the David Pocock-Michael Hooper two number 7s ‘Pooper’ combination.

Sio won a couple of early scrums against Dan Cole but as the match continued the experience and (perhaps?) superior scrumming skills of Cole started to prevail. Last season Sio was formidable presence as a runner. Somehow this year, exemplified by his poor game against England, Sio’s field game, along with his scrumming, has gone backwards.

Robertson, on the other hand, has played well in the few chances he has had in the scrums and around the field. He should have started ahead of Sio.

Before the Test, Nick Phipps was giving interviews making the claim that he has learnt a great deal since the June series against England, “not only on the field but also around the mental side of the game.”

There was little evidence of this improvement with his performance at Twickenham.

At crucial times at Twickenham, Phipps’ passing let him down. And he gave no indication of mental strength. For instance, he tried to milk a penalty when Mako Vunipola fell through a ruck and sort of impeded Phipps if, and this is the crucial aspect, he decided he wanted to be impeded.

Phipps touched Vunipola with the ball, to claim a penalty, before running awkwardly across the field and sending out a poor pass that Sekope Kefu fumbled.

England hacked through and Jonathan Joseph won the race to score under the posts. This try and conversion gave England the lead for the first time in a Test that looked like becoming a Wallaby rout against them.

The reason Jaco Peyper did not award a penalty against Vunipola, which would have been justified, is that he, along with most of the other leading referees, is hostile to halfbacks (particularly) trying to milk a penalty in this type of situation.

The leading referees tend to invoke the generic law of “the spirit of the game” in denying this cheeky halfback tactic.

Phipps’ poor pass, as well, was one of several he made during the Test, to the detriment of the Wallabies attack.

Then in the 49th minute of the Test, England won a penalty which Ben Youngs (the man of the match) took a quick tap, sold a dummy to Phipps and raced through for a try. This try and the conversion by Owen Farrell took England to a decisive 27 – 16 lead.

Taking the dummy from a halfback in this situation is just poor, unacceptable decision-making from a player whose main task it is to make sound, leading decisions, on attack and on defence.

We had in these two incidents the difference between effective cheeky half-back play (Youngs) and ineffective, self-defeating, cheeky/stupid half back play (Phipps).

Michael Cheika has refused to acknowledge throughout this season that Nick Phipps is not a viable starting Wallabies half-back. He has refused to give, say, Nik Stirzaker and to lesser extent admittedly Nick Frisby, any chance to establish themselves as the starters when Will Genia, now playing in France, is not available.

This is indefensibly poor selection. It smacks too much of an affectionate reliance on players from the Waratahs squad that Cheika took to a Super Rugby triumph. But that triumph was several years ago. Coaches need to move on from triumphs of the past, if they want to achieve new triumphs.

On the issue of where to play Israel Folau, Cheika has been similarly obstinate. He selects him as a fullback and then gets him to play in the centres on attack.

The problem with this system is that it presumes that Folau can read a rugby game in the manner of the world’s best fullback, Ben Smith. The plain fact of the matter is that Folau still doesn’t have much of an intimate feeling for rugby.

It presumes, too, that Folau is comfortable in all the roles, fullback and centres, on attack and defence, he is required to play.

It is obvious to anyone who looks at Folau’s play that he is an instinctive rather than a reactivate player, like Ben Smith. Folau likes to run with the ball. That is his strength. He doesn’t off-load with any great skill or enthusiasm.

He should be played in a position like the wing where his running and jumping can be exploited and told to concentrate on doing these two things.

Playing at fullback, though, he is frequently out of position. He disappears, too, on attack for long periods of a match. At Twickenham this happened yet again. He made one break in the second half but this was about it.

Looking back on Folau’s Test career, he played his best rugby on the wing. This is where he should be selected for the Wallabies.

Now we come to the ‘Pooper’ tactic.

It is clear that the Wallabies do not gain much and lose a lot by playing Hooper and Pocock together. I noticed that Pocock was used as a lineout jumper early in the Test against England.

Hooper, too, has been used very occasionally in previous Tests as a jumper. But neither of them can be relied upon to consistently win lineout ball.

The Wallaby pack is clear unbalanced playing both Pocock and Hooper as flankers or as a number 7-number 8 combination.

The matter will resolve itself next year as Pocock leaves Australian rugby to take a extravagantly-paid sabbatical from Australian rugby.

But when Pocock comes back in 2018 to Australia, the issue will become live again and Cheika, presumably still the Wallabies coach, will have to come up with a better way of using these two players than he has this year.

My view is that right now, Pocock is an inferior loose forward to Hooper. He is slow, rarely is seen when his side is retreating, gives away more penalties than he wins with his constant digging for the ball (almost always coming into the ruck from the side), and offers a limited attack.

He is not the player he was in Rugby World Cup 2011 when he almost single-handedly defeated the Springboks in the quarter final before his long run of injuries.

Hooper with his power and speed, if given the chance, could develop into a much more effective number 7 for the Wallabies than Pocock, now clearly in the twilight of his career, can hope to be in the future.

Georgina Robinson has a disturbing story in The Sydney Morning Morning Herald that Pocock is being paid $750,000 for his year out of Australian rugby. The year out, though, includes a lucrative stint in Japan with the Panasonic Wild Knights.

The idea is that Pocock can refresh himself so that he can return to Australian rugby in 2018 fit, bursting with energy to inspire the Wallabies to great things going into the 2019 Rugby World Cup tournament in Japan.

I asked Bill Pulver about rumours of this astonishing pay-out by the ARU for a player clearly past his best days earlier in the year. He refused to confirm my claim to him that Pocock was getting a $750,000 pay out for not playing rugby in Australia.

According to the SMH story, this payout follows the Cheika model “where the top players are paid accordingly and everyone else, to greater and less degrees, takes what they’re given.”

Or not take what’s given, in the case of Liam Gill who has a lot more to offer Australian rugby than David Pocock, at this time.

There are so many things wrong with this Pocock pay-out that it is difficult to know where to start.

Let’s begin with the fact that Pocock is not worth anything like this amount of money to Australian rugby.

His contract resembles the sort of contract the New Zealand Rugby Union offered to Richie McCaw.

But McCaw was a winner, at Super Rugby level, Test level and Rugby World Cup level. Pocock is not a winner at any of these levels.

Pocock, too, represents the past for the Wallabies, not their future. If he wants to take a sabbatical to go overseas, he should be allowed to do so – without payment. If he then wants to play in Europe, so be it.

Georgina Robinson calls the Pocock payout “Australian rugby’s great big, expensive experiment.”

This is being generous. An “experiment” suggests that there is something new perhaps coming out of what us being done. This is unlikely.

We know what we are going to get when Pocock comes back from his gap year. The Wallabies will get a loose forward who is not quick enough to be an effective number 7 and not big enough to be an effective number 6 or 8.

Meanwhile, the ARU spends $750,000 from a cash account that is under strain, money that could have gone into heartland rugby.

The other thought about all this is that the ARU has to wean itself off a dependence on Michael Cheika. As Poth Hale points out on The Roar, Cheika’s Wallabies have a June-November Test record (which excludes the losses to the All Blacks) of 37.5 per cent, with three wins and five losses.

In all Tests this season the Wallabies have had nine losses from 15 Tests

This is a terrible result for Cheika, the Wallabies, the ARU and for Australian rugby.

Why the ARU is seeing a gold lining in all of this disaster, with talk about how “important” the season has been for the Wallabies, needs some explaining to the rugby community.

Let’s be honest. If someone has predicted this sort of season at the beginning of the year, that person would have been dismissed as a know-nothing.

Increasingly, the know-nothings in all of this are the ARU board and its chief executive. The case for a heartland revolt against them has become as overwhelming as it is necessary.