Australian rugby in 2017: The annual Wallabies roller coaster

Our Australian rugby Year in Review series concludes with the side that tested both the friendship of supporters who wanted to believe and The Roar’s servers when that belief was most tested: the Wallabies.

The 2017 international season began while we reminded ourselves that despite everything that went down in 2016, it was still little over a year since Australia made a Rugby World Cup final, and that still had to count for something, surely.

The Super Rugby season wasn’t going so well, but the mood within the camp was still positive before the first Test of the year.

Or, at least, we thought it was positive…

The June internationals
Despite all but two rounds of the Super Rugby season having been played, the start of the Wallabies’ 2017 season highlighted the eternal disconnect between the national and state set-ups: Michael Cheika remarked that the Wallabies “weren’t fit enough” when they came into camp, even though all five Australian sides had played 13 games to that point.

Cheika then sprung another surprise, naming Karmichael Hunt at inside centre for his Test debut despite Hunt having played almost exclusively at fullback for Queensland and even training most of the week of the Fiji Test at the back.

But Hunt rewarded the coach with an excellent display in both attack and defence, as the Aussies scored a 37-14 win in Melbourne.

Danger side Scotland awaited in Sydney, and the first cycle of the ‘up one week, down the next’ existence of the Wallabies in 2017 was complete.

The slick attack in Melbourne was now ponderous, and the defence appeared all over the shop, with Scottish flyhalf Finn Russell playing himself into a late Lions tour call-up with a masterful display. Israel Folau’s exceptional aerial skills on repeat proved the only highlight in the 24-19 loss.

The third of the June ‘arvo Tests’ saw a 40-27 win over Italy in Brisbane, but it was far from convincing. Two late tries saved Australian embarrassment – in this particular instance – where the Azzurri trailed by just one point into the last five minutes.

The benefit of no Australian sides troubling the scorers during the final weeks of the Super Rugby finals, or so we hoped, was that at least the Wallabies now had time to get themselves to the required level of fitness. Surely they would be better by the time the Bledisloe and Rugby Championship rolled around, we told ourselves.

AAP Image/Dave Hunt

Bledisloe Cup and The Rugby Championship
They weren’t.

It’s still hard to work out what was worse about that first half display in Sydney, where the Wallabies trailed the All Blacks 40-6, having already missed 37 tackles, that they were so disorganised in defence or in attack.

The Wallabies never looked like scoring a try in that first 40, and it didn’t look any better ten minutes after half-time, with New Zealand leading 54-6.

At that point it wasn’t just a cricket score Australia were looking at but the danger of being asked to follow on was very real.

Changes were made, the injection of Tevita Kuridrani shored up the porous midfield, and somehow the Wallabies found confidence to not just play with, but score tries from. And score some good tries at that. The defensive issues dominated the headlines of the 54-34 loss the next day and would remain front of mind for the rest of the season, but the way the home side finished in Sydney gave another glimpse of what was to come.

And what followed was cruel: arguably the Wallabies’ best performance since the 2015 Rugby World Cup, only marred by a late defensive lapse that saw Beauden Barrett score a converted try in the last three minutes in Dunedin, to win by six.

Kurtley Beale had put the Wallabies ahead minutes beforehand, and Australian fans again feasted on fingernails; we’d been here too often before.

The pain of the loss made the extent of the turnaround all the more remarkable. Beale and Bernard Foley defended in the front line and defended well. The defence had significantly fewer moving parts and looked much better as a result. Foley’s kicking became a concern, missing four of his six conversion attempts, though the criticism was harsh at the time given three of those misses cannoned into the posts. The critics would be justified soon enough, however.

The roller coaster chugged on. The Dunedin loss would have to remain the highlight for the time being, with a lacklustre 23-all draw with South Africa in Perth following, and a 45-20 win over Argentina in Canberra coming after that. Neither game reached any great heights, and indeed Australia should’ve been made to pay for their glacial start against the Pumas. Only five tries in the last half an hour avoided further embarrassment.

Another draw with the Springboks in Bloemfontein followed, with Beale again the standout in a game played at a hectic and ultimately futile pace. Elton Jantjies levelled the scores at 27-all with a penalty with just over ten minutes to play but then hooked what would’ve been a 79th-minute winner.

The Wallabies went to Argentina from there and dominated the Pumas to win 37-20 in Mendoza. Reece Hodge’s display and Foley’s kicking – again – were the major talking points in the win that remarkably made a winning season still possible.

Back in Brisbane, and with the Bledisloe again out of the reckoning, the Wallabies ran out in the first Indigenous playing strip for a national side and played their game of the year, beating New Zealand 23-18. A 77th-minute Hodge penalty from miles away sealed the win after All Blacks fullback Damien McKenzie missed a conversion four minutes earlier.

Late-game nerves were prominent yet again, but the Wallabies showed plenty of grit in hanging on to claim the win.

“The side that played the first four Tests of 2017 bears resemblance only in the colour of the jersey and the names on the team sheet to what won in Brisbane,” I wrote after the win.

Fans were riding high again, and the light at the end of the tunnel was only getting brighter.

AAP Image/Dave Hunt

The Spring tour
The Wallabies landed in Japan en route to the United Kingdom full of confidence, with the Brave Blossoms hosting Australia for the first time on home turf.

Foley was rested, and with no specialist flyhalf picked for the tour – still a bizarre move, months later – utility back Hodge was given the number ten jersey. And he made a good fist of it, providing decent direction in a pretty simple gameplan, and kicking nine conversions from as many attempts in the comfortable 63-30 win in Tokyo.

To Cardiff, and though the recent record is very much in Australia’s favour, the Wales match was highly entertaining. Three first-half tries put Australia well ahead at the break, but the second period was largely dominated by the Welsh, particularly with skipper Michael Hooper in the sin bin. But the Wallabies new-found confidence to hold out games again came through, the 29-21 win Australia’s 13th straight over Wales.

A similarly one-sided record with England loomed next, but not in a good way for the tourists. And just as Wallabies fans were thinking the worst of 2017 was in the rear-view mirror, it was there right in front of us again.

After conceding a lopsided penalty count against Wales, it was more of the same ill-disciplined nonsense and poor reactions all-round – on the field, in the coaches’ box, and throughout the post-mortems. Hooper became the most yellow-carded player in international rugby, and Cheika once again endeared himself to the cameras.

Photo by Dan Mullan/Getty Images

Once the ref-blaming over disallowed tries died down, we were left with a disappointingly lacklustre performance from the Wallabies littered with poor decision-making and a complete dearth of urgency. The senior players let the side down badly and the younger players had no idea what how to get in the game. All the improvement we thought we seen over the previous month vanished in 80 minutes at Twickenham.

And that would’ve been a bad enough note to finish on, but Scotland had other ideas about that. The Scots confirmed their rising chances for next year’s Six Nations with a commanding 53-24 win at Murrayfield.

Leading 17-12 at half-time, the home side took full advantage of the red card handed out to Sekope Kepu, running riot in the second half to score six tries to two. If the scoreboard in Sydney didn’t really reflect Scotland’s dominance back in June, it certainly did the second time around.

The loss sunk the Wallabies to a 7-5-2 win-loss-draw record for 2017, but that mirrors very little of how they finished the season. It would’ve been disappointing if we hadn’t been in this position before. Cheika used a lot of players in 2017, another dozen or so debutants among them, but it still feels like we’re as far away as ever from knowing what the best side looks like.

The Wallabies lost their direction, lost their attacking shape and by the end of the season just had no answers at all. Everything learnt previously had been forgotten, and that stung.

And if that paragraph sounds familiar, it’s a straight cut-and-paste from the 2016 season review. There were promising signs along the way in 2017, but we’ll be starting 2018 in essentially the same place.