The horse that bolted: How Australian rugby fluffed 'project players'

How does a rugby nation sustain the depth and quality of its professional playing population, and create a healthy, winning culture within the game?

This is the fundamental question underpinning all the other questions currently besieging the ARU and their involvement in Super Rugby.

You can do it as the New Zealanders have, by steadfastly refusing to increase the number of professional entities in the name of TV ‘marketing expansion’ and concentrating on your talent base.

You can do it by creating a strong winning culture from that concentration, from the grassroots all the way up to national level, which helps plug the leakage of talent to the cash-rich foregin clubs.

If your team wins consistently, you learn winning habits on the field, and you learn what constitutes a winning environment off it. And you do not want to leave that behind until the final, pension-funding stage of your career.

There are another couple of ways you can do it. You can streamline the process of talent identification from youth level upwards, and you can create a policy to attract players from outside the country and ‘naturalise’ them in order to strengthen perceived weaknesses in the national game.

Ireland and Scotland have a small number of grassroots clubs (fewer than 500 between them), a relatively small senior, male, playing population (less than 40,000), and only six fully-professional representative teams.

Rightly or wrongly, both have up until now exploited the residency qualification of three years in order to create a systematic policy of grooming ‘project players’ from outside the home union. Although the IRB have recently changed ‘Regulation 8′, increasing the three years of qualification to five, the rule change won’t be implemented until December 31, 2020, giving interested parties until the end of 2017 to finalise their ‘project’ plans.

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Scotland already have already reaped three bona fide international starters from this policy, in the form of fringe Springboks Josh Strauss and WP Nel (both qualified in 2015), and Dutchman Tim Visser (2012), with another South African waiting in the wings in Cornell du Preez (2016).

The SRU even employs an international recruitment advisor specifically tasked with the projection of foreign players as Scottish internationals.

The IRFU has, if anything, pursued the policy even more vigorously than its Celtic cousins. Among the ‘naturalised’ who have already won Ireland caps are soon-to-be 2017 British and Irish Lions Jared Payne (New Zealand 2014) and CJ Stander (South Africa 2015), along with South Africans Quinn Roux (2015) and Richardt Strauss (2012).

Stander is the template for the success of the policy.

A former South African under-20s captain and named in the Springbok wider training squad back in 2012, he was rejected as ‘too small’ for his position in the back row and left for Munster as a project player in late 2012. After an outstanding Six Nations earlier this year, he is now in pole position for the Lions’ No.8 Test jersey against New Zealand. Is he big enough for the Springboks now?

Among those who will qualify by residency for Ireland in 2018 are ex-Canterbury outside-half Tyler Bleyendaal and Chiefs inside centre Bundee Aki. The outgoing Connacht head coach, Pat Lam, has spoke recently of his pride in the fact that only one of the 44 players in his playing squad is a non-Irish qualified player.

The IRFU recruitment policy has also been targeted by position-of-need. No less than four of the project players are hookers, one at each of the four professional regions. There is Strauss at Leinster, who already has 17 caps, and ex-Chiefs and New Zealand under-20s hooker Rhys Marshall at Munster, who in all likelihood will play for Ireland in the future. A solid supporting cast includes Aucklander Tom McCartney at Connacht, and South African Rob Herring at Ulster.

By hook or by crook, the question of depth been addressed.

While the official number of rugby clubs in Australia is about twice the number in Scotland and Ireland combined, and the number of senior males playing the game approximately the same, the dynamic factors – the accelerating loss of players to England, France and Japan, and the spread of the existing talent base over five franchises instead of three or four – are more influential.

I could only find one significant Australian player, Brumbies’ wing Henry Speight, who fit into the same category as those Scotland or Ireland project players.

Even back in the amateur era, Australia would recruit players in positions-of-need – like Argentine props Enrique Rodriguez (in the mid-1980s) and Patricio Noriega (end of the 1990s) – to bring technical know-how and IP to their area of the game.

In recent times, those who might have been genuine Wallaby projects in the making – like Jacques Potgieter, who made such a positive impact at the Waratahs in 2014 and 2015 – had already won foreign caps and were therefore unavailable for selection.

Moreover, there are positions-of-need which have been allowed to develop into derelict zones rather than being repaired by a fresh influx of talent. At tight-head prop for example, Australian rugby has lost Greg Holmes and Kieran Longbottom to England, Paul Alo-Emile to France and Finlay Bealham to Ireland in recent years.

Perhaps even more significantly, Allan Alaalatoa’s brother, Michael, was allowed to drift out of the Australian system at the Waratahs for Manawatu in New Zealand in July 2015. Michael is now part of an immensely strong four-prop rotation at the Crusaders, alongside All Blacks Wyatt Crockett, Owen Franks and Joe Moody.

With Charlie Faumuina off to France at the end of the current season and Alaalatoa qualifying by residency in mid-2018, it is hard to see any other tight-head in New Zealand clearly ahead of him approaching the 2019 World Cup.

The result is that Australia now has only two tight-heads of Test-match quality: Sekope Kepu and Allan Alaalatoa. If Kepu had chosen to stay in France rather than return to Sydney, the cupboard would indeed be very nearly bare.

Another player who falls into the same category as Potgieter is Rebels’ No.8 Amanaki Mafi. Mafi won the first of his 13 caps for Japan in November 2014, after being poached on residency grounds by then-national coach Eddie Jones.

AAP Image/Julian Smith

Had he been recruited by the Rebels as a project player back in 2014 – and Andrew Cox has talked of the privately-owned club taking precisely this kind of approach – I have little doubt that he would be making his debut for the Wallabies this summer. The outstanding back row among the Australian Super Rugby franchises so far this season would comprise Michael Hooper at 7, Scott Fardy at 6 and Mafi at 8.

Mafi enjoyed another personal highlight reel performance against the Waratahs over the weekend. It included:

• 12 carries, three of which were ‘dominant collisions’, with another three going for clean breaks.
• Four offloads, including one ‘clean break assist’.
• Two fumble recoveries.
• Four turnovers at defensive breakdown, plus one other slow-down.
• 11 out of 13 tackles completed.

For Mafi’s sake, it was shame that his miss on Israel Folau on the very last play of the match spoiled what would have been a near-perfect individual game.

Although he is not a lineout player, Mafi would fit the Wallabies’ current back-row selection preferences extremely well, offering the strength over the tackle ball to complement Hooper:

Here Mafi shifts across from guard to attack the first tackle situation – he has the mobility to make tackles on backs (more than one-third of his tackles were on backs or targets running in space against the Waratahs).

When he gets there and establishes over the ball, he cannot be driven out of his position directly, even by two props (Kepu on the deck, and Tom Robertson). Both are forced to try and peel him away from the side, from a passive rather than an aggressive cleanout posture. In the event, Mafi stayed upright long enough to win the penalty.

The sequence from 52:00-52:20 showed Mafi at his defensive best, involved in all of the three initial phases of a Tahs’ scrum attack.

In the first frame, Mafi’s involvement as a jackal ensures that there is a four-second delay in Taqele Naiyaravoro’s presentation of the ball, and as second phase is completed he is already running hard to wrap around the ruck on the following play.

Nowadays, forwards are expected to make around 30 sprints of up to 20 metres-per-run, and this constitutes a large portion of workrate. In the two middle frames, Mafi is making a sprint to get to the far side of the second ruck, while the other Rebels defenders are in ‘jog’ or ‘walk’ mode. A ten-metre gap (“1”) quickly develops between the two halves of the defence as a result (52:16).

Rebels halfback Brett Meehan is still pointing at the unoccupied space at 52:18, just as the aim of Mafi’s sprint becomes clear. He has already arrived at the third phase breakdown in good position – better than that of the Tahs’ first cleanout support, #16 Damien Fitzpatrick – in order to win turnover for his team.

Mafi has the grit to do the extra hard yards when the going gets tough – as the highlight reel from the game illustrates:

Even as Hooper goes to touch the ball down for a try at 66:42, Mafi is still trying to flip him on his back to prevent a proper grounding.

Mafi has always been a potent force with ball in hand. Part of the Rebels’ plan was clearly to profit from a lack of defensive concentration by the Waratahs near their own goal-line, and Mafi was instrumental in two tries scored from tapped penalties – the first scored directly by Mafi himself at 17:51, the second on the following phase, by Jonah Placid, at 48:39.

Mafi is equally adept at carrying the ball close in or out wide. In the wider channels, he has the speed of thought to identify opportunities early and communicate them to the distributor inside him, and the speed of foot to make them count:

Before the play ever materialises, Mafi foresees that he is in a mismatch in space with the Tahs’ #6, Ned Hanigan. As soon as Hanigan tips his hand and over-commits outside to the drift, Mafi is able to cut back through the gap between him and Kepu, and outpace the covering Cam Clark for good measure.

At an exit ruck deep in the Rebels’ end, Mafi was also able to read the space up the middle of the ruck as Nick Phipps drifted too far away from the ‘boot’:

Mafi is careful to hold his position as the last man at the ruck, with two Rebels’ cleanout players ahead of him – several players are pulled back by the whistle for picking up the ball when they at the head of the ruck in this position. As soon as Phipps disappears out of frame ‘stage left’, Mafi is away upfield with a fend, setting up the position for Placid’s first try.

Summary
The quality and depth in Australia’s professional player base has been steadily eroded with the talent spread among five franchises, and emigration to the club games in England, France and Japan.

Rugby nations like Ireland and Scotland have sought to regain some of the lost ground by the ‘player project’ policy, especially in relation to unwanted South African talent. Players are identified as future internationals, or simply as Ireland or Scotland-qualified prospects, then they complete the three-year residency to become eligible for their adopted country.

Australia got what it required in the amateur and early pro eras, picking up Argentine scrum experts like Rodriguez and Noriega in a definite area of need – not just as players but as coaches and sources of essential rugby IP.

Now the knack of maximising resources seems to have been temporarily lost.

Not only has Australia effectively lost the chance to create its own ‘projects’ with the change in Regulation 8, it is developing players like Amanaki Mafi who will never to be able to wear the green and gold, even though their presence enriches (and is enriched by) Australian rugby.

Moreover, it is losing its rights to the likes of Michael Alaalatoa, who are naturally a part of the Australian system – to New Zealand of all people! – and in one of the positions where historically, the Wallabies have always most needed help.

It makes little sense.