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Forget the rocks and diamonds – it’s all diamonds now. Quade Cooper’s value is growing by the day, and he’s not even playing after an injury suffered in the very first round of The Rugby Championship against the Pumas on August 6.
He remains the only true No.10 in Australia, standing head and shoulders above the rest at the ripe old age of 34.
Back in the noughties, Stephen Larkham was ‘the man’, and thereby hangs a tale. At that time, I was working for Wales, and we had a secret ‘trade agreement’ with New Zealand. With the All Blacks having installed Graham Henry and Steve Hansen as two-thirds of their coaching trifecta, there was an pipeline of information flowing between the two nations.
I sent one of my reports on Scotland in return for data on South Africa and Australia.
“Typically thorough, very detailed” came the clipped reply. The background information on the Springboks and Wallabies made an unforgettable visual impression on me. There were two dozen pages on South African lineout formations and drive variations, and 69 different Wallaby back-line strike moves.
Quade Cooper. (Photo by Chris Hyde/Getty Images)
The stuff on Australia was truly mind-boggling, and it all revolved around one man, Wallabies No.10 Stephen Larkham. Whether it was one phase or three, everything went through the outside-half: Larkham passing short or long, Larkham straightening and passing back in the blind-side wing; Larkham on the switch with one of his centres, or dummying the switch and running wide. There were enough variations to fray the best of rugby minds.
According to those Kiwi stats, Stephen Larkham’s accuracy over all passes was somewhere between 98-99%. He was largely mistake-free while running the most sophisticated offence of that era.
When he returns to Australian rugby in Canberra next season, do not be shocked if you spot Larkham, silently crying into his glass of Chardonnay at the degradation of Australian attacking IQ.
On Saturday, the Wallabies played the Azzurri in Florence, and it was the men in blue who showed the attacking fluidity and intelligence that once belonged to those in the green and gold. If you had said that back in 2005, you would have been derided as the village idiot, thrown in the stocks and pelted with rotten vegetables for your folly.
In last week’s Coach’s Corner column, I pointed out that Will Skelton handled the ball at first receiver as many times in half an hour as the nominal No.10 (Bernard Foley) did in the entire game.
At the Stadio Artemio Franchi in Florence, it was even worse. The top three first receivers for Australia were Skelton and inside centre Hunter Paisami with seven touches apiece, and Allan Alaalatoa with six.
No. 10 Noah Lolesio only broke into the top three as an auxiliary receiver. By way of contrast, the Italy No. 10 Tommaso Allan bestrode his position like a colossus, with 11 touches at first receiver divided between pass, kick and carry, despite receiving only 75% of the ball that Australia won.
Allan, be it noted, was a late replacement for Paolo Garbisi and is not even first choice at his club Harlequins, where England Marcus Smith is the man in possession. But Italy still had the confidence to let attacking play flow through their outside-half, unlike Australia.
The willingness to side-line the No. 10 10 from the running of the ship is so recurrent that it has become epidemic. It was the topic of this article at the end of August . The main part of that article concluded as follows:
“The four sequences reviewed in this article suggest a very peculiar set of play-making tendencies. In total, 14 phases started with a Wallaby forward at first receiver, six with one of the backs outside 10, and only one with the nominal Australian flyhalf.
“James O’Connor made the play once (albeit to telling effect) while contriving to involve himself in no less than six rucks.
“It is a strange distribution of tasks indeed, at a time when the recent performances of Johnny Sexton for Ireland and Richie Mo’unga for New Zealand have forefronted the need for a strong game-manager at No.10 in no uncertain terms.”
At the time, I felt that O’Connor’s unwillingness to step in at first receiver was linked to a lack of confidence after his long injury lay-off. With the benefit of hindsight, I am not so sure. The mistrust of the 10 as the key tactical navigator seems more like a Wallaby coaching principle than an individual defect.
After that match in San Juan, Dave Rennie commented:
“We thought his [O’Connor’s] experience would be very important, and we wanted him to drive the ship, allow us to implement our plan, and we were pretty clunky. We lacked cohesion, so he’s missed out on selection.
“It’s such a massive position for us, isn’t it? There have certainly got to be opportunities over the next few weeks for someone to grab that position.”
The question now looks different after the debacle in Florence: how can you drive the ship and create cohesion when you’re not the man handling the ball? Like O’Connor in Cuyo, Lolesio’s only serious touch on attack created a scoring opportunity for the wing outside him:
The young Brumby is hidden behind a first touch from the giant Skelton, but at least he is making the play. Why can’t he be trusted to do it more often?
Let’s investigate the Australian negative by looking at an Italian positive first. Ex-Wallaby centre turned pundit Morgan Turinui made an important point after the match in Tuscany had finished:
“We’ve seen a theme with the Wallaby defence a little bit this year – that they’ve struggled with the very new nature of attack right around the world.
“Two tries from Italy tonight and a couple of line-breaks were real changes of pictures. The Wallabies are not coping with that attacking shape. They’ve got a lot of work to do defensively.”
Most of the Italians play in the URC, where the dominant attacking team is Leinster. In the Leinster attacking shape, most of the attacking flow comes through the number 10, and the Azzurri coaches have introduced a copycat pattern in the national side:
At the start of the sequence, it is the close relationship between the forward passing out of the line, and the back behind him (Azzurri No.15 Ange Capuozzo) which creates the opportunity for the Italian fullback to dance around Jock Campbell. Campbell has less time to react and move his feet when Capuozzo makes his move to the outside.
That relationship between forward and first receiving back is evident when Tommaso Allan takes over on the second phase:
Allan is no more than a metre behind his pod of forwards, which means he can accelerate around the corner of the pod quickly if the forwards choose not to take the ball on themselves.
By the third clip, the Italy attack is well and truly in the ascendant:
Because the shape is so compact, all of the Australian defenders are committed, either to looking in at the ball or a man, and but for a handling error Italy would surely have converted a clear three-to-one overlap against Tom Wright down the right side-line.
The same shape was responsible for two of Italy’s tries, one in the first half, the other in the second:
In both cases Allan is playing right on top of the man in front of him, and in the first instance willing to take a crushing hit from Will Skelton, in order to commit the defence and release Capuozzo out wide.
Now let’s take a sample from the Wallabies, in the context of the attacking involvements of their No. 10:
First receiver on the initial phase is Hunter Paisami, with a cleanout over the top of him by fellow centre Len Ikitau and Fraser McReight. So, now you’d be expecting Noah Lolesio to take over the reins on second phase, right? Wrong. The ball is given to Jock Campbell off a pass from Tate McDermott, with Lolesio cleaning out over the top of him.
By third phase, the purpose of the attacking shape was very murky:
Even though the ball is in midfield, the attack can only really go in one direction on the next phase – out to the Australian left, where there is a line of six Wallaby forwards with three backs (Paisami, Wright and Ikitau), standing in no particular order behind them. There are four Australians and no Italians absorbed in the ruck and the widest attacker is a front-rower. Only one team has a sense of what it is trying to do in this scenario, and it is the defence.
After one more forward carry, Paisami again appears at first receiver, delivering an in-pass to none other than Lolesio, who is properly blasted in the tackle by an Azzurri second row:
There is one more carry by Skelton before McDermott can find nothing better to do than kick the ball tamely upfield, and into the arms of one of Italy’s most dangerous counter-attackers, wing Monty Ioane:
When he makes the kick, there are only six Australian attackers left on their feet against a full line of defence.
When the Wallabies scored their second try of the game just after half-time, they achieved it over two attacking sequences lasting a total of 19 phases. In the course of those 19 phases, Lolesio had one cleanout and received the ball once in support of a Jake Gordon tackle-bust. He did not make one pass, but ran straight upfield into a tackle on the one occasion he appeared at first receiver.
Summary
My amazement at the depth and complexity of Australian back moves in the early and mid-noughties is still fresh in the memory, I can still taste it. Everything revolved around the ability of outside-half Larkham to deliver the goods, whatever the length or direction of the pass: in-pass, back-flip, switch, dummy-switch, skip-one, skip-two or over-the-top. He could do it all successfully, 99% of the time.
On the evidence of the game in Florence, the Wallabies have slipped from world-leaders to bottom-feeders in the science of attack, and the capacity of their No.10 to pull the strings on the pass. As surely as O’Connor was marginalized in San Juan, so Lolesio was taken out of the attacking pattern in Tuscany.
Judging purely from the number of touches they have gotten at first receiver, it seems that none of O’Connor, Lolesio or Bernard Foley are trusted to run the cutter.
Let them clean out at rucks, support other people’s breaks and deliver the occasional kick, but don’t let them make play through phases via the pass. The rugby world has indeed been turned on its head.
The constructive interaction of forwards and backs on attack was Italy’s preserve, and their success has left a backwash of serious questions in its wake. How can the likes of Mark Nawaqanitawase or Jock Campbell ever develop into Ange Capuozzo if nobody passes them the ball?
Why not have done with the pretence, and just install Paisami at No.10? Can Australia preserve Quade Cooper cryogenically for World Cups to come?
Cooper is the last man standing at flyhalf in Australia – and only barely so. He is fast becoming not so much the relic of a distant past as the conscience of the rugby it once played. All Wallaby supporters should have their hands clasped tightly in prayer that he makes it the World Cup in France – because after him, there is nothing, and no-one else.