Five into four doesn't go: Move the Brumbies to Melbourne

If you want to live by the rolling maul, you will die by the rolling maul.

That is the hard lesson that the rolling maul-obsessed Brumbies need to learn if they want to win big matches, and win back their supporters.

So with time up at Canberra Stadium on Saturday night, during an error-ridden but intense match, with the Highlanders leading 18–13, the Brumbies opted to drive a lineout five metres from the visitors’ try line.

They had scored a try in the 25th minute from a clever lineout move, which involved dummy running by their halfback Joe Powell and a switch run through a gap in the front of the lineout by flanker Chris Alcock.

But this time, as in other times in the match and repeatedly throughout this season, the Brumbies relied on bashing ahead from the lineout, a tactic that resembles a tank trying to push through formidable barbed wire defences.

The Highlanders anticipated this last rolling maul onslaught. They threw forwards and backs to check each small break-through. The maul plodded forward. Then it was shoved sideways. The front of the thrust disintegrated.

And a surging phalanx of Highlander defenders smashed the ball carrier to the ground. The ball was buried under a pile of bodies.

Game over! The Brumbies had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

The point about teams like the Brumbies and the Bulls (for that matter) that have an obsession with using the rolling maul as their main way of scoring tries is that they learn to play brain-dead rugby.

All the passing and running skills that champion teams exhibit, including props and hookers, are somehow lost with the obsession to smash some few metres forward to gain points.

If you don’t practise your running and passing skills continually under the pressure of a match, you will lose those skills.

The Brumbies built a reputation, especially in the great early years with master-coach Rod Macqueen, of being the smartest team on attack and defence in world rugby.

Coaches from around the world came to Canberra to learn and steal the Brumbies’ continuity game and drop-dead clever set moves.

Now no one comes to Canberra now to learn from the Brumbies.

The side is incredibly boring to watch and is not a contender for winning the 2017 Super Rugby tournament while it continues this obsession with a slow-plod march towards the try line against teams that know where the attack is going to come from, and how to combat it.

Readers of The Roar will know I have railed for years against the rolling maul as a so-called offensive play. I have argued, too, that the laws of rugby should be adjusted to make it more difficult to play rolling maul rugby.

I want the ELVs rule that you can bring legally pull down a maul added to the laws of rugby. Officials from England blocked this by claiming that pulling down the maul caused injuries. What nonsense! I have never seen a player injured from a collapsed maul.

Now that England are finding it difficult to defend against rolling mauls their officials are starting to talk about making pulling the maul down legal.

Memo to the ARU board: Commission Rod Macqueen to use his influence to get this adjustment to the laws introduced as soon as possible.

One of the unintended consequences of an obsession with the rolling maul is that it almost forces teams to play brain-dead rugby. The ‘might is right’ doctrine takes the cleverness out of rugby and away from the players.

You only have to look at how the Bulls franchise, the fountain-head of the rolling maul obsession, has regressed as a team.

Against the Blues on Saturday night, the Bulls look totally hapless once the ball was moved away from the lineouts.

The franchise is trying to evolve away from its maul-obsessed game. But the coaching staff are finding that players brought up with the rolling maul find it difficult to learn all the myriad of skills that need to be embedded into the decision-making, positioning, handling, and passing systems that they have to learn.

The Brumbies are rapidly becoming a clone of the Bulls.

As they demonstrated against the Highlanders, the Brumbies have a similar one-dimensional game that will only get them so far against resilient and smart opponents, as they found on Saturday night.

This isn’t just me railing against the rolling maul culture (or lack of culture).

Mark Ella in Saturday’s The Australian made this telling criticism of the rolling maul tactic and the Brumbies coach, Stephen Larkham, who endorses it:

“Over the past two seasons, this basic and boring approach (the rolling maul) has typified the Brumbies and coach Stephen Larkham is quite unapologetic about it. It seems ironic that one of Australia’s most gifted running No 10s would endorse this tactic … Why Larkham cannot instruct his players to remotely emulate the glory days of Brumbies rugby, on which he had a massive influence, is beyond me …”

If the ARU board were as on the ball on rugby matters as they are on gender issues, there would be a hold on the appointment of Larkham as an assistant coach to the Wallabies. He should be told that if the Brumbies rolling game is all he can coach, or wants to coach, then he needs to forget higher coaching honours for the time being.

Larkham is being groomed, as one of the favoured few within the small, magic circle Australian rugby, as the successor of Michael Cheika as the Wallabies coach.

The ARU board needs to ask itself these questions before his appointment as assistant coach is made:

1. Will Larkham enforce the same brain-dead, boring rugby on the Wallabies that he currently inflicting on the Brumbies and their supporters?
2. What will this sort of system do to the Wallabies brand?
3. And what does this rolling maul obsession tell us about Larkham’s ability to identify new talent and the new direction rugby is heading in the era of the no-go head high tackle?

This last question is particularly relevant as to how the new concussion-related changes to the tackle law are going to effect the way the game is played and refereed.

We saw a poorly disciplined Reds side go down to the Jaguares on Sunday morning mainly because they lost players to the sin bin because of high tackling.

The Reds conceded two tries when they had two players in the sin bin, one of them for a head-high and the other for trying to knock down a pass.

Quade Cooper, who is sitting out a suspension, went on Twitter to complain about this outcome: “Nice way to ruin a game.”

But the offences were committed, especially the head high tackle.

Moreover, the undermanned Reds didn’t help their cause when their half kicked a box kick that was grabbed by the explosive winger Ramino Moyano to race away for a 50m break-out to score a sensational try.

There are two aspects worth noting in all of this.

First, why would you kick away the ball when you have only 13 defenders? Australian teams this season seem to totally unaware of how to manage situations like having a player in the sin bin.

Second, Moyano is not a big player but he is quick. The new tackle requirements, in my opinion, will bring back smaller players into the game and make their smallness part of their strengths as an attacking player.

This is something that Larkham doesn’t seem to have realised right now. He has virtually taken any quicksilver, break-out runners out of the Brumbies playing squad and game plan.

And to ensure that the backs can’t run the ball, even if they want to give it a go, the Brumbies’ half-back Joe Powell is being coached to stand over it at the rucks until the big forwards are ready to rumble – and the defence is in place to smash them to the ground.

This is playing rugby by numbers, a system that is easy for defending sides to defend against.

There is one other aspect of the Reds–Jaguares match that needs noting, however. And that is how the intrusion of the TMO, Santiago Borsani, totally favoured the home side.

The New Zealand referee, Mike Fraser, who did a good job, was forever having to review plays that had just been completed for supposed infractions by the Reds.

SANZAAR needs to nip this sort of over-intrusive intrusion by the TMO in the bud before it starts to affect the outcomes of matches.

And, in passing, I will note that the TMO for the Brumbies–Highlanders match did not replay a head-high, choke tackle on the Highlander lock Joe Wheeler as he tried to score the winning try.

If the high tackle had been identified, the Highlanders would have been awarded a penalty try.

The high tackle was obvious. It was even picked up by the commentators. And Wheeler himself pointed out to the referee that he had been tackled around the neck and that he should look at a replay.

As it happened, the Highlanders scored from the scrum and no harm was done to them.

But this sort of selectivity by the TMOs on what to show and not show deserves some attention by SANZAAR.

We will probably wait an eternity for this to happen, if it ever does, from an organisation that moves, at its fastest, with snail-like rapidity.

Weeks after a special meeting in Europe to decide the future composition of the Super Rugby format we are still waiting for some sort of announcement.

The only things we have been told is that the matter is desperately complicated, which it is, and that there will be total silence on details until the silence is broken with an announcement.

Meanwhile, there has been endless speculation in rugby circles.

The gist of the speculation is that SANZAAR is looking, probably after 2018 but possible before (who knows?), to a 15-team competition.

South Africa, which is virtually bankrupt, seems to be willing to drop two teams from the South African Group. These teams are likely to be the Southern Kings and the Cheetahs.

Apparently (and this is just insider talk admittedly) the South Africans are prepared to keep the Sunwolves and the Jaguares because they represent areas where rugby and especially Super Rugby can expand with some hope of benefiting financially from overseas sales of television rights.

There is also the factor that the SARU has always tried to protect the integrity and financial value of the famous Currie Cup tournament.

The cutting back of local South African sides for Super Rugby actually enhances the value of the Currie Cup tournament.

New Zealand is rightly holding on to its five Super Rugby teams. In due course, I can see a sixth New Zealand side, an Islander franchise, playing out of the biggest Polynesian city in the world, Auckland.

And Australia? All the talk is about one team having to go.

Which team, though, should get the chop?

On the basis that they have the bulk of all the rugby players in Australia, the Reds and the Waratahs will have to stay.

There are enormous problems with getting rid of the Melbourne Rebels, among them the fact that the team is privately owned. One can imagine the legal consequences of forcing a private owner out of the Super Rugby tournament.

There would also be the financial compensation payouts to be considered by an ARU that is hardly flush with money.

Other considerations in favour of the Rebels is that the Victorian Government is hell-bent on establishing Melbourne as the sports capital of Australia. They want to enter into lucrative deals with the ARU over Super Rugby and Tests against the All Blacks. There is also a government-backed Victorian Rugby Centre of Excellence under consideration.

Also, Melbourne is the second biggest market in Australia and the ARU needs to have a strong presence to be a player in the lucrative television and online contracts coming up for negotiations.

The Western Force have a time advantage in providing the ability of Super Rugby broadcasts to have the entire evening viewing showing live games.

There is a strong New Zealand and South African ex-pat presence in Perth. Perth itself is a large television market that is dominated by AFL but where there is no local NRL presence in the form of a local team.

Moreover, the Force is producing a large number of home-grown Super Rugby players, something we are yet to see from the Rebels.

And one other matter. The Force organisation has surprised the ARU by announcing that it will set up a system of selling shares to its supporters.

The real surprise here is that the hapless ARU were taken by surprise by the Force’s initiative. For all practical purposes, the ARU owns the Force. It is a measure of the ARU’s competence as an organisation that it had no knowledge about a defensive move made by officials of an organisation they actually owned!

This leaves the Brumbies.

There was a crowd of 11,125 watching to see their team go down to the Highlanders. The game was given plenty of publicity. There were online calls, for example, of a “call to arms” for The Plus500 Brumbies: Undbreakable Brumbies call for crowd support.

You have to think that this is an optimum Brumbies turnout, given the dire state the franchise is in with its stifling play on the field and its scandals off the field.

Greg Growden, a rugby journalist with a great knowledge of what is being talked about in the closed off world of rugby officialdom, reckons that if Australia is to be allowed only four teams, then the Brumbies franchise should be moved to Melbourne and link up and strengthen the Rebels.

There is one other advantage of this scheme, aside from keeping the intellectual property of the Brumbies as more intact than would be the case if the franchise were dissolved, and it is this.

The way is left open, when Australian rugby is ready for a fifth franchise, to create a franchise based in the new Parramatta stadium (when it is built) and tapping into the vast talent of Polynesian players, rugby and league, who play in that area.

Ten years ago, I would have rejected any suggestion of the Brumbies franchise being finished off. Even earlier this year, I was arguing for the Force to be incorporated into a Parramatta-based Super Rugby franchise.

But now there is such negativity about the Brumbies franchise, on and off the field, that suggest its end days are nigh.

So if there are to be four Super Rugby franchises in Australia, they should be: The Waratahs, the Reds, the Western Force, and the Melbourne Rebels/Brumbies.