Bledisloe 3: Are we there yet?

On July 5, 1975, one day after the celebration of American Independence Day, Arthur Ashe became the first Afro-American athlete to win the Wimbledon Men’s Singles title.

To do it, he had to beat his nemesis on and off the court, Jimmy Connors.

At the time, Connors was the man. He was only 22 years old (nine years younger than Ashe), had already set the trend for future players with his blazing double-handed backhand, hadn’t dropped a set en route to the final and had beaten Ashe in all three of their previous meetings.

He was an unbackable favourite to win again.

But Arthur Ashe won that overcast afternoon on centre court in one of the great triumphs for tactical planning and execution in any sport. His success continued well after his life as a tennis player ended, and some of his sayings since have helped trigger a landslide of books on business and sporting theory:

“Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is usually more important than the outcome. Not everyone can be number one… You’ve got to get to the stage in life where going for it is more important than winning or losing.”

Ashe was speaking about the importance of being process-driven rather than results-driven, and the need for a truer acceptance of failure in the pursuit of ‘best performance’.

Once you agree with Ashe’s first statement, the path opens up towards a series of little improvements and the enjoyment of skill-building. Good habits are then cemented by experience and your alertness to that experience.

Ashe’s comments are reinforced by perhaps the greatest Afro-American athlete of them all, Michael Jordan. In an advert for a well-known sporting goods manufacturer, he stated that his success was built around a core of continuous failure:

“I missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

(Image: Flickr/Jason H Smith CC-BY-2.0)

Jordan wasn’t even regarded as the athlete of his family growing up – that was his younger brother Larry. When he first tried to qualify for the university basketball team, he read through the list of players the coach had selected only to find his name was not on it.

“I often think to give up and leave everything,” Jordan said.

“But then I close my eyes and see again that list that didn’t include my name. Usually by doing that my spirit is revived… I am ready to accept failure. Everyone may fail. But I don’t want to say that I don’t try”.

In 1993, Jordan apparently finished his sporting career (for the first time) well outside the game that made him a modern icon, trying his hand at baseball instead.

He took the bus to matches with his teammates at the minor league Birmingham Barons, he arrived early and stayed late at every day of spring training, and found himself once more looking at team lists to see whether he had been picked or not.

As one of his teammates said, “the dude was not afraid to look bad”.

The All Blacks assistant coach Wayne Smith officially retired from international rugby late on Saturday evening. Back in 2001, he had been sacked as the head coach of New Zealand, and it looked like his time at the top was over.

Instead, he embraced the failure and found his true calling as a hands-on coach and born teacher of the game – a natural number two rather than a number one.

His influence as a number two and thinker about the game has extended far beyond the vast majority of number ones’. It has permeated New Zealand rugby at every level and moved out well beyond its boundaries onto the global scene.

Sir Graham Henry described him simply as “the best coach I have ever worked with”, while ex-All Black Tana Umaga added, “first and foremost, he is just a good man”.

It was Smith who first came up with the mantra “better people make better players” – that emphasis on processes and the value of the journey again, reinforcing the good habits on the field with good character off it.

“Smithy treats everyone with respect and sees the good… That’s what engenders everyone’s trust, and buy-in from the players”, says Umaga.

For all their travails over the past couple of seasons, Michael Cheika and his coaching group still clearly have that buy-in from their Wallaby players. It was flagged by Will Genia in the build-up to Bledisloe 3, who called it the best Wallaby environment he’d ever been involved with.

(AAP Image/SNPA, Ross Setford)

The victory over New Zealand on Saturday evening was a win for Cheika’s process-driven culture, and the willingness to embrace failure within the coaching group.

That applies nowhere more than on defence, where Nathan Grey has had the courage to ditch a plan that hadn’t worked against the All Blacks and reinvent his thinking – if not from scratch, then as close to it as you will get in international rugby.

From the 2016 Rugby Championship to the first match of the 2017 tournament, Australia conceded 24 tries in four games against New Zealand. At Dunedin, they leaked five but showed some improvement.

On Saturday at Brisbane, the All Blacks only crossed the whitewash twice, and it was Australia’s solidity and resilience without the ball, as much as anything, which won them the game.

Grey clearly took a great deal from a study of the performance of Andy Farrell’s Lions’ defence against New Zealand teams on the June tour, and the fruits of his efforts were evident in an overhauled defensive pattern on Saturday.

In this article during the summer, I observed how the Lions defended the key Maori playmaker Damian McKenzie with a tight three-man triangle on turnover or kick returns, and this was a method adopted successfully by the Wallabies in Brisbane right from the very start of the game:

The Wallabies have just turned the ball over from a kick but there is immediate pressure on ‘DMac’ – Bernard Foley is at the tip of the triangle, with Michael Hooper outside him and Sean McMahon inside. McKenzie is forced back into McMahon and loses the ball in contact.

The next time McKenzie got the ball in a counter-attack situation was from an ill-directed Wallaby kick in the 18th minute:

The Wallabies clearly knew what they were trying to do, and Rob Simmons shows great urgency to shoulder his way past Nepo Laulala and force his way into position as the insurance policy at the right-hand base of the triangle.

McKenzie again tries to step the ‘point’ (Sean McMahon) and a jackalling opportunity opens up for Hooper as the first man to arrive when the ball goes to ground.

The pressure on a strong point of McKenzie’s game had an impact, just as it did in the Lions-Maori game – apart from one second-half line-break, he was not as influential a factor as he had been in the Rugby Championship.

The Wallabies applied the same principles on defence to both of New Zealand’s main playmakers:

In the first example, the All Blacks have won back another of their own high kicks but the triangle is already in position on number ten Lima Sopoaga, forcing Aaron Smith to pass short to Kane Hames and kick the ball away on the following phase.

There is no more ‘shoot and drift’ in this formation. At 42:09, all three defenders (Tatafu Polota-Nau and Adam Coleman at the base, Tevita Kuridrani at the point) are all facing and running directly upfield, north-south.

A couple of phases later, Rieko Ioane becomes isolated, leaving Michael Hooper to complete the turnover.

The ultimate achievement of the triangle formation was the Wallabies’ first try from a New Zealand attacking scrum, seen here in real time:

The Wallabies are set up in man defence on their right side at the start of the play:

Genia will push out onto Sopoaga, while Reece Hodge will drive up from the tip of the triangle at 6:46 into the space between Sopoaga and Sonny Bill Williams. Both Foley (inside him) and Kurtley Beale (outside) are facing forwards at the base as Hodge makes the intercept and runs away to score at the other end of the field.

Tevita Kuridrani was also a titan in the organisation of the Australian defence throughout, and he is forming a very destructive alliance with Marika Koroibete as the permanent openside winger on the first phase. I expect this combination to continue on the end-of-year tour.

The other element of improvement without the ball was in recovery defence on the rare occasions when New Zealand got in behind the Wallabies on the first phase:

Koroibete again shows his defensive intelligence in blocking the ‘money ball’ to McKenzie (1) and forcing Naholo to pick out Ryan Crotty (2) in support instead. This gives the Wallabies a few priceless seconds to regroup around the tackle and effect the turnover.

Summary
It takes a great deal of genuine humility to be able to truly embrace failure and plant the seeds of success in its good earth. But that is what Arthur Ashe, Wayne Smith and even the stratospherically great Michael Jordan achieved.

Ashe went against type to ‘softball’ a player he had never beaten before into submission, Jordan undertook a new sport at the age of 31 without any expectation of repeating the success he had achieved in basketball, and Wayne Smith intentionally took a back seat to become one of the most profound influences of the professional rugby era.

We do not know how far Michael Cheika’s stress on a process-driven culture can take the Wallabies. Maybe it will not result in World Cup – or even Rugby Championship – glory. It is, however, resulting in a host of small improvements, particularly on defence, and an increased enjoyment of ‘the ride’ by the players.

That, in itself, is no small accomplishment.