Why the Wallabies should be taking Argentina very seriously

Remember the names: Estadio 23 de Agosto, San Salvador de Jujuy. Estadio Padre Ernesto Martearena, Salta. Estadio Unico Madre de Cuidades, Santiago del Estero. What do they have in common? They all hosted matches during Scotland’s recent three-Test series against Michael Cheika’s Argentina.

All of the venues are natural Soccer grounds, with a capacity between 21,000 and 30,000. All of the three are more than 1,000 kilometres from the capital, Buenos Aires. They are intimate and intimidating in atmosphere, hostile to the uninitiated.

It is important. Australia will be playing their first two games of the Rugby Championship in Mendoza and San Juan, in the north of the country and well away from cultural luxury of BA. There will be out-of-town unfamiliarity, and it will not be friendly.

In Wales it is still called the Tucumán effect, after a notorious tour game the national team played at the Estadio Monumental José Fierro back in 2004. Tucumán left an indelible mark on those Welsh tourists, and some still bear the scars today. 

Gone were the sophisticated bars, museums and cafés of the Paris of South America. Gone the eight-lane metropolitan highways and the effortless Subte (the subway) of the capital, swapped out for horse-and-cart in Tucumán. Gone the high-class steak-houses, bartered for huge carcases of beef roasted out in the blinding sun and smoke of the street.

When the players arrived at the Estadio Monumental for training, they looked up to see a solitary workman perched on the roof high above them, a cigarette dragging from his thin lips, oblivious to danger. Treading a slim steel girder, with no safety net below. Health & Safety in Tucumán? No such thing.

One of the Welsh newsmen following the tour exchanged his gleaming skyscraper hotel for a hole in the wall, quite literally.  He pulled back a blanket in his suite to find a ragged gap with no window and no frame. He shook his head ruefully, “It looked like a bomb had gone off. Not only could I hear the sounds from the street below, I could have jumped straight down there among them.”

Welsh tour analyst Alun Carter had to film the game from behind the posts on the terraces. Towards the end, he found himself distracted by an eager gang of youngsters jumping around his knees in curiosity. Or so he thought. When he looked around, half of his equipment had been carried off with shrill falsetto laughter, into the mill and jostle of the crowd.

The one common denominator was the noise, the incessant noise. Some of the tourists had a sneak preview on a visit to La Bombonera to watch the local derby between River Plate and Boca Juniors. Their bodies reverberated like tuning forks as the supporters chanted and stamped their way through the match.

It was the same, but much, much closer in Santiago del Estero for the decisive third Test between Puma and Saltire. “It’s the pitch-side noise – it’s like a giant bull-ring. The noise is as loud as anything we’ve heard”, the side-line Sky Sports crew reported. The chanting, the stamping; the baying in the blood, for payment in blood.

That is what Dave Rennie’s Wallabies will have to learn to survive and conquer on their two-match mini-tour of South America. They played five of their six matches at home in the 2021 Rugby Championship, but the November awakening in Europe was a rude one. Australia has to find a robust formula for winning home and away, and they have to find it now, because their key battles next year will be staged in Saint Etienne and Lyon, not Brisbane or Sydney.

This is the new Argentina. After their brief excursion into Super Rugby, they are now led by ex-Wallaby head coach Michael Cheika, with two high-profile ex-players, Felipe Contepomi (backs/attack) and Juan Fernández Lobbe (lineout/defence) sitting just underneath him on the coaching panel. As a professional entity, the Jaguares are dead in the water, with 33 of the 34 players named in Cheika’s squad plying their trade in Europe.

Both Contepomi (Leinster) and Fernández Lobbe (Toulon) enjoyed the biggest moments of their club careers there. Felipe in particular will bring with him a wealth of cutting-edge I.P, from his time as a support coach to Stuart Lancaster and Leo Cullen at the Dublin province. After Ireland’s series win in New Zealand, the Leinster-isation of the Southern Hemisphere is about to gather more momentum.

In their July series against Scotland, Argentina’s set-piece strongpoint was the lineout, rather than their traditional preserve, the scrum. Under the world-class stewardship of Guido Petti, they won 88% of their own ball and dug deep into Scotland’s throw, allowing a measly 69% return.

Given Petti’s previous success in 2021 against the likely Wallabies lineout caller Matt Philip – illustrated in this preview article before the England tour in July – it makes Cheika’s decision to rest him for the upcoming double-header all the more mystifying.

At the third Test in Santiago del Estero, Scotland only scraped away ball from 57% of their own lineouts. They were under constant pressure as Argentina split into two pods around Pablo Matera at the front:

And Guido Petti in the middle, or at the back:

As we saw in the first two Tests of the series against England, it is not just the winning of first touch that counts at lineout, it is your ability to deliver the ball that you really want, when and where you want it. Compare the two following examples at the very start of the game:

Because Scotland are under pressure, they take ball from the front of the line. Even after two passes are made (from 5 Johnny Gray to 9 Ali Price, and from Price to 12 Sione Tuipolutu), they are only a couple of metres beyond the near 15 metre line, and Tuipolutu has not escaped the screen of Argentine forwards. Loose-head prop Thomas Gallo is able to make a tackle and number 7 Santiago Grondona gets over the ball to complete the turnover.

Barely a minute later, Argentina got terrific off-the-top ball from Petti in a very similar field position on attack:

In this case, the first two passes have already shifted the ball on to the near post, engaging the Scotland number 10 Blair Kinghorn and opening up the width of the field for a full back-line attack. Only a clinical final pass is missing.

The steep pull-back pass and the late shadow-running off the ball all bear the unmistakeable imprint of Contepomi’s time spent under Stuart Lancaster at Leinster:

There were already some signs of his early work coming to fruition at Santiago del Estero. Argentina scored one excellent turnover counter try in the first period.

The resemblances were even clearer as the game reached its climax:

We have seen exactly the same tight diamond shape and short passes in the hands of Ireland against the All Blacks recently. The Pumas scored seven tries in their three games against a stingy Steve Tandy-coached defence, a considerable jump from their five tries in six matches during the 2021 Rugby Championship.

Rather more problematic was the conversion of Argentine tight forwards into convincing ball-handlers, with rugged second row Tomás Lavanini at the head of a number of the typical examples:

In the first instance, Lavanini is not quite sure whether to tip on to Joel Sclavi or pull back to Matías Moroni, and ends up taking the ball into one of Scotland’s prime turnover merchants, Rory Darge. In the second, the wait-time at presentation ruins co-ordination on the next phase, with Gallo taking a noble, if unexpected falcon. In the third example, Darge is again on hand to make a steal after the tackle by his partner-in-crime Hamish Watson.

The teething problems were summarized by a longer sequence in the fifth minute of the match:

The Argentine forwards are simply not accustomed to making the lightning-quick decisions and ball-placement at the line in the system Contepomi wants to coach: six seconds for the first presentation by Lavanini, seven at the following ruck by Agustín Creevy. It is almost impossible to build any momentum from that base without over-playing your hand.

Summary

It will not be particularly warm at the Estadio Malvinas Argentinas in Mendoza on 6^th August. The temperature will probably be 16 or 17 degrees, clement and comfortable – but the reception from the home supporters will be white-hot for the Wallabies.

There will be around 30,000 raucous La Albiceleste in their blue-and-white shirts packed into a natural amphitheatre, built especially for the 1978 FIFA World Cup. Scotland’s Archie Gemmill once christened the venue with a memorable World Cup goal against the Netherlands.

It is something Dave Rennie’s Wallabies will have to get used to: riding out the tough moments away from home, ripping a victory from the teeth of a crowd dead-set against them, finding a way to win. 

They may avoid the holes in their hotel walls and the roasting carcases in the street, but they will not be able to shut out the noise -the baying, chanting, bull-ring noise. Not entirely, not for the whole game. They need the mental skills to make the experience work for them rather than against them, if they are to go on and achieve success in France next year. 

On the playing front, there are still many unknowns with Michael Cheika’s new Pumas. Will he go for broke, and twist with Lautaro Balan Velez and Santiago Carreras in the halves? Or stick to the known, with Tomás Cubelli and Nicolás Sanchez? Will he prefer gnarled experience, or bring fresh energy to the front and back rows of the scrum?

The absence of world-class Guido Petti will be a welcome surprise, not least for Matt Philip. A strong group of four Australian big men – Philip, Rory Arnold, Jed Holloway and Nick Frost – could turn the set-piece on its head and give the Wallabies an unexpected lead at set-piece.

Behind them, Felipe Contepomi is still groping to find the right pieces of the jigsaw on attack. Argentina do not have the ball-handlers and decision-makers in the tight five to go eyeballs-out Leinster, so what chance for the Wallabies to slip in and play stowaway as Felipe’s voyage to the promised land unfurls? There could be a clutch of gilt-edged turnovers to be carried away. Now that really would hush the crowd and silence the nay-sayers, home and away.