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Opinion
It was a conscious thought that slowly surfaced while watching Australia A rally late to find the winning play in the second Japan Rugby Challenge Series game in Fukuoka on Saturday evening.
The young Australian side had had multiple opportunities to find the try they so desperately sought in the last 10 minutes, but just couldn’t stick the vital component when needed. So they’d cough up a scrum penalty, or a lineout throw would be askew, or a pass would go down.
After several attempts, they finally got a maul going forward properly, with Queensland hooker Richie Asiata barging over at the back in the 80th minute, and which New South Wales flyhalf Tane Edmed managed to convert after the siren drawing in a sideline conversion that went gun barrel straight outside the right hand upright for 95 per cent of its journey from tee to posts.
Edmed’s sideline winner was one of many headlines coming out of the game in a Wallabies context, but I can’t help but wonder if more questions might have been created than answered, with the ‘A’ team’s fourth-straight win.
Jock Campbell during a Wallabies training session (Photo by Chris Hyde/Getty Images)
For one, how big a squad will make the trip north in the next few weeks?
New Zealand over the weekend named a 35-man All Blacks squad for the three-Test tour, and then named another 28-man squad for the two-match All Blacks XV tour just yesterday.
And that’s not at all to suggest that Rugby Australia should blindly follow our trans-Tasman neighbours, simply an observation that 63 Kiwis will be in the UK and Ireland in November and that there will almost certainly be players crossing between squads.
Australia last year initially named a 37-man squad for the three-Test Spring Tour, but then immediately lost the three Japanese-based players and Marika Koroibete, who stayed home for family reasons. 37 became 33, but five further players were added during the tour, for a final tally of 38 players on tour.
Dave Rennie carried squads of 38, 37, and 37 through the three stages of The Rugby Championship. Of the 58 players he’s named in squads so for in 2022, 43 have played a Test match.
With this year’s Spring Tour comprising five Tests – the first and fifth of them outside the prescribed World Rugby international window, it’s not too difficult to see as many as 37 or 38 players named, and well over 40 used.
But how many of the Australia A squad get the nod remains anyone’s guess, with Friday night’s third and final game in Japan quite likely to complicate the issue further.
Will both Edmed and Ben Donaldson go, with Noah Lolesio presumably already pencilled in? Bernard Foley looms as a known quantity, and with fewer than a dozen matches between now and the Rugby World Cup, there is a pretty solid case for the three young playmakers to spend time in a tournament-like environment.
(Photo by Morgan Hancock/Getty Images)
And frankly, with the three of them all very different players at 10, there’s also a pretty solid case for all of them to be there on tour in a horses-for-courses sense.
Could we see as many as 10 front rowers tour? Three of each flavour of prop, and four hookers?
Given how wide open the hooker spot seems to be, it would seem to make plenty of sense to get as many rakes exposed, for the same reasons as taking three young playmakers. And given the way props have been dropping just in the last few days, it would seem a luxury to have all six fit and able to train anyway.
Locks Nick Frost and Cadeyrn Neville again showed plenty of enterprise and work rate in the second game in Japan, and it feels like they will have ticked the boxes set for them by the Wallabies coaches. With Matt Philip and Jed Holloway finishing the Bledisloe Tests with injuries, Frost and Neville’s displays in Japan are very timely.
But many locks are needed? How many lock-blindsides could be fit in? The first is a genuine unknown that can and may well be affected by the second consideration there. The answer to the first might determine how many of the Ned Hanigan and Seru Uru-type players can be shoe-horned in.
How many European locks could or should be genuinely considered? My esteemed podcast co-host threw up Rob Simmons’ name yesterday, and anyone watching him over the last few weeks and not just relying on two-year-old memories or worse would know it’s really not a silly idea at all.
Should Darcy Swain make the trip at all? And if so, should it be from the start of the tour, despite not being available to the Italy match?
How many fit centres do the Wallabies currently have? Len Ikitau and who else? How many bolters are out there?
And then we get to maybe the unknown-est of all the unknowns: the back three.
Marika Koroibete won’t tour, straight away breaking up the Tom Wright-Andrew Kellaway trio that started both Bledisloe Tests. Jordan Petaia still has a lot of question marks over him. Suliasi Vunivalu has as many questions over him as Petaia plus all the new ones that have emerged in Japan. Do Jock Campbell’s attacking instincts cancel out his sometime questionable positioning and defence?
Tom Banks is not a name I expected to be mentioning in a Spring Tour context, but here he is. Does his sudden and unexpected re-emergence push Reece Hodge forward as a midfield option? Are Dylan Pietsch and Mark Nawaqanitawase both wing options for the tour or are they an either/or proposition?
(Photo by Pete Dovgan/Speed Media/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
It’s as worrying a selection conundrum as it is fascinating to see how it plays out.
Wallaroos talent shows Rugby Australia can’t sit on its hands
In a classic case of great minds, half a page of notes scribbled during the Wallaroos’ excellent first half at Eden Park were quickly rendered useless as I worked my way through Geoff Parkes’ weekly wrap yesterday.
And without wanting to completely rehash our similar thinking over the weekend, this main central point remains: as much as Rugby Australia may not be able to completely afford professionalising the women’s game before their stated goal of 2025, this current Rugby World Cup in New Zealand and widening gulf between the pro and amateur outfits has already shown that Australia equally can’t afford to sit back and wait.
2025 gives RA a full four-year cycle before hosting the Rugby World Cup on home soil in 2029, so their logic is not unreasonable. But by then, the teams going professional now will have two full RWC cycles under their belt, and two-and-a-half for the likes England and France.
And that’s before we mention the NRL-shaped elephant in the room. By mid-next year, seven new NRLW teams will have come to life in three seasons. Who knows how many more it might be by 2025?
It’s important that RA is on record as stating 2025 as their goal, because that’s now something they can be held to. But their ambitions really need to be stronger than that, otherwise rugby will only be plundered further as other sports continue their investment in their women’s competitions. The race to full professionalism is very real.
Like pretty much all sports at the moment, rugby’s growth is coming via female participation. But it really feels like the opportunity presented by that historic Olympic Sevens Gold Medal in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 is being lost as other sports just motor on past rugby.
And worse, it kind of feels like rugby is there holding the gates open for them to speed through.