Why new wine must shun the old bottles in Rugby Australia’s new era

The new should never be confused with the old, even if the odd history lesson helps. Wind the clock all the way back in 1982, and British rugby league was staring down the barrel at a problem of similar magnitude to that which Rugby Australia faces today.

Great Britain has just suffered their second consecutive series whitewash since 1911, and it had happened at home. The Kangaroos rampaged through the north of England, winning all of their 13 games by an average of 40 while conceding six tries all tour.

The average margin in the Tests was 27 points, and Great Britain had to wait until the third game to score their solitary try of the series. The general narrative before the tour – that the Kangaroos would turn out to be fitter and more powerful, but the British players better at the basic skills – proved to be nonsense. Australia were on another planet in all aspects of the game.

It was a harsh lesson, one which prompted the appointment of British rugby league’s first director of coaching later in the year. That man was Phil Larder, and his background was different than most of his peers. He was a teacher by profession and had gained a degree from Loughborough University, which was at the frontier of sports science in the UK. But he had no record as an international player in league.

Larder represented ‘new wine’ for a code which was dominated by prominent ex-players who turned into coaches or administrators after retirement, often without gaining any significant accreditation at either. Larder’s success in bringing Britain back to a level of respectability depended on his determination to overcome the inbuilt resistance to change that those coaches represented.

When Phil sat down a year later over a glass of beer at the Steyne pub on Manly’s sea-front with two of the architects of the Kangaroos’ success, the two Franks – Johnson, who performed Phil’s role as director of coaching in Australia, and Stanton, the meticulous head coach of ‘the Invincibles’ – there was no mincing of words.

Stanton gave voice to all of Larder’s unspoken thoughts:

“You are your own worst enemies. You are held back by a weak administration, with two governing bodies with conflicting agendas always at war with one another.

“Your professional game is weak, hamstrung by the selection of outstanding ex-players as coaches at your top clubs, positions which they don’t deserve by virtue of coaching experience or depth of knowledge about the game.

“The coverage you receive in the media is swamped by the overwhelming interest in soccer. The four leading sports pages in Sydney news all forefront rugby league. In England, you struggle to find one paragraph on the game, even in the middle of a Kangaroos tour.”

Now substitute Rugby Australia and the Fox Sports broadcasting network for “the two governing bodies” in the first paragraph, and add administrators to “coaches” in the second. Finish by replacing ‘soccer’ with rugby league and Aussie rules in the third, and you will have a picture which is uncomfortably familiar to any Australian rugby supporter.

Fast forward to 1999. The year of Australia’s only World Cup success in the professional era, now 21 years distant, and it was founded on a unique holy trinity of administration, coaching and captaincy – John O’Neill, Rod Macqueen and John Eales – which has never been equalled in the years since. That alliance is examined in detail in Spiro Zavos’ excellent article on the Wallabies’ World Cup success that year.

(Credit: William West/AFP/Getty Images)

Neither O’Neill nor Macqueen were notable ex-players, while Eales pointedly refused to sign up to the captain’s letter which came in the lead-up to Raelene Castle’s resignation.

O’Neill was the youngest-ever CEO of the state bank in New South Wales, and he became the standout sports administrator in Australia in the 1990s and 2000s. He cut through rugby’s obsession with committees, while re-establishing control of a wage structure which had become hugely inflated by the battle for TV rights between Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch in 1996. O’Neill was his own man and nobody’s puppet.

He also had the presence of mind to appoint a new Wallabies coach from outside the New South Wales orb of influence. That man was Macqueen, who had been unwanted in Sydney and was coaching in Canberra with the Brumbies, the home for the misfits in Australian rugby.

Macqueen, in turn, surrounded himself with an outstanding group of assistants, all of whom who were world leaders in their areas of expertise during his time in charge, and none of whom were prominent rugby internationals in their playing days.

Chief among them were John Muggleton, a league man from the Paramatta Eels who changed the fundamental shape of defence in the other code, and Eddie Jones, who sat behind Phil Kearns at Randwick as a player, while rising to the top and remaining at the cutting edge of the game for over 20 years as a coach.

The lesson now is the same as it was in 1982 and 1999. The quality and depth of coach education in the game, and administration of it by people who have made a success of their professional lives outside rugby, is key to the renewal of the game at all levels in Australia. Neither will occur magically through the agency of outstanding ex-Wallabies.

For most of the last dismal World Cup cycle, Australia’s two main coaching posts were occupied by Stephen Larkham and Nathan Grey, who were anywhere between good and great in their playing days and earned 137 Wallaby caps between them. But thus far at least, their coaching careers do not compare with those of John Muggleton and Eddie Jones.

That cycle was characterised by a worrying lack of adjustment to what opponents were doing. Michael Cheika’s Australia lost to England on seven consecutive occasions, the average margin of defeat was 17 points, and the average number of points conceded by the Wallabies was 36. Those kinds of stats should simply not be possible between two top tier rivals in the professional era.

Michael Cheika with Eddie Jones lurking in the background. (Dave Rogers/AFP/Getty Images)

Once England found the formula to beat the Wallabies, it was a case of rinse and repeat. The average score in the last half hour of each game between the two countries actually increased from 12-18 (for the first three matches played in Australia) to 4-19 in the final four matches played outside it. England won every game going away.

By the time the two sides met in the quarter-final in Oita, a predictable pattern was established. England were content to let Australia have the ball for long periods. The Wallabies dominated possession (64 per cent, building over two rucks for every one of England’s) while Jones set up his team to play off the turnovers they knew would inevitably come.

It was clear from the start that England intended to use the tackling and turnover ability of their dual opensides in the back row to run down the Wallabies’ attempts to move the ball and make the second pass:

Here is the archetype for the entire game, discovered in a relatively innocuous situation. England are going to spread one of their opensides wide, to the area around the 15m line (number 6 Tom Curry) and have him ‘bracket’ the ball-carrier with a back (number 9 Ben Youngs) who is turning in to face him.

If the ball-carrier (Jordan Petaia) tries to offload, he risks giving up the intercept. If he steps back inside, he will run into one of England’s most secure tacklers and biggest on-ball threats.

The warning signs were also present in this piece of action only one minute later:

Kurtley Beale switches with Petaia, and Petaia’s offload comes perilously close to interception by England’s other openside (Sam Underhill) while the England backs seal the route to the outside. Curry is offered a realistic shot at the turnover when the ball goes to ground.

It was therefore no surprise when England generated their second try of the game from the same defensive set-up:

The look from the defensive side is already a familiar one:

Curry makes a destructive tackle on David Pocock, and Henry Slade outside him isn’t interested in the receiver, he’s looking in for the ball instead.

As Australia fell further behind on the scoreboard in the second half, their passing began living on a razor’s edge against England’s defensive shape:

This time Tolu Latu takes the ball to the line with Johnny May looking in at the interception and Underhill looming as the on-ball/offensive tackle threat inside him:

When Australia began to play away from the double menace of the openside on-baller plus hawking outside back, they just ran into another form of trouble:

Christian Leali’ifano passes across the back of the ruck to avoid the duo of Curry and May on the right-hand side…

… only to deliver Allan Alaalatoa into the hands of a choke tackle turnover in the middle.

The coup de grace was a soft intercept as Beale determined to play out from an even deeper position in his own end:

Once again, the winger (Anthony Watson) jams in on the pass, with Tom Curry in faithful attendance inside him. It was a puzzle the Wallabies never managed to solve, either on the field or in their preparation before the game:

Summary
The old bottles who wrote the letter which forced Raelene Castle’s resignation as CEO of Rugby Australia will not be the agents of a revolutionary new change. The new wine will have to come from somewhere else. Dave Rennie would certainly be a good beginning, if he still wants to coach the Wallabies now that Raelene Castle is gone.

Who fills the role of head administrator is another matter. He or she will need at least some of John O’Neill’s background, and his ability to approach the issues from the perspective of an outsider who has no skin in the game. They cannot afford to be the pawn of broadcasters like Fox, who want more expansion and more matches, but have been blind to the dilution of standards in the Super Rugby competition.

The drop in playing standards has gone hand in glove with the deterioration in coaching IQ in Australian rugby, which is probably now at an all-time low in the professional era.

The cartel of outstanding ex-Wallaby captains will not fix that either. There has to be a return to Phil Larder’s starting point, a genuine enthusiasm for coach education by people steeped in its science, with the appropriate pathways from amateur to professional made clear and available.

At the end of the Kangaroos tour in 1982, the official world ratings showed that all of the top five stand-off halves were Australian. They were Wally Lewis, Brett Kenny, Alan Thompson, Mitchell Cox and Terry Lamb – with the last two being uncapped players who had never been in a Test match.

If you were to list the top five stand-offs in union right now, there would not be a single Australian among them. The whirligig of time has brought in his revenge.