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Rob Kearney knows a thing or two about rugby. He won 95 caps for his country, and three more for the British & Irish Lions across the span of a glittering career. He has worked under some of the best coaching minds in the game, including Michael Cheika, Joe Schmidt, Stuart Lancaster and Leo Cullen, and Andy Farrell.
He played professional rugby for 17 years, and the last two of those were spent in Perth at the Western Force. When Rob Kearney has something to say about the state of Australian rugby, it is well worth the listening time.
On a recent Virgin Media Sport rugby forum with ex-Scotland coach Matt Williams and ex-Ulster and Ireland wing Andrew Trimble, he was in typically robust, straight-shooting form. Asked about how Australia goes about its business, his face screwed up uncomfortably for a moment.
“Honestly, I was pretty unimpressed by it. The game is in a difficult place down there: you’ve got Rugby League, Australian Rules, you’ve got cricket. You know, Rugby does not really come on to the radar that much. I played games in front of [only] 4,000 people.
“The [lack of] quality coaching was the area which surprised me most. The quality of athlete is incredible, it’s there for all to see, they have some immense athletes. But unfortunately, Rugby doesn’t get first, second or third choice of those athletes.
“The game is struggling down there, I think having the World Cup is very important for them, but this is a team [the Wallabies] which needs some wins to pull the public back in [its] favour.”
Matt Williams reinforced the main point.
“Australian rugby was renowned as [producing] the best thinkers from the 1990’s up to the 2003 World Cup, at making creative players. Now we are seeing Ireland with far more creative players than Australia can muster. Robbie has hit it on the head, it’s all about coaching and coach education.”
Kearney’s commentary is a sample of the way in which the rest of the rugby world now looks at Australian coaching: once at the cutting edge, but now a fading force.
How does that affect Dave Rennie’s preparations for the World Cup next year? Rennie will be returning from an end-of-year tour with more credits than debits, despite winning only two of the five tour games. His Wallabies lost to Italy in the middle of the tour, but kept both the big matches against Ireland and France within winnable reach. Hell, they even ended the tour in the black, with a +1 points margin overall.
They were tough, cussed and tenacious, and all of those attributes were on show at the Principality Stadium on Saturday. Australia looked dead and buried after 55 minutes with Wales 34-13 ahead on the scoreboard, but scored the last 26 points of the game to win it 39-34. It was a terrific effort by an understrength side at the very end of a very long international season.
So, it’s all looking good, right? Wrong. The performance in Cardiff had the Brumbies stamped all over it. The Canberra-based outfit possess that same resilience of character by the bucketload, but there is still a problem with the Brumby-sizing of Australian rugby at national level.
It is dragging too many fringe players, and too much un-Australian thinking into the team with it. In this recent article, I explored the background to the Wallabies’ inability to play through their number 10 when Quade Cooper is not around. That is not what I recognise as a Dave Rennie team, but it is typical of the Brumbies.
In the tight forwards, the Wallabies have often doubled down on the Canberra calling card: three props (James Slipper, Allan Alaalatoa and Scott Sio), two hookers (Folau Fainga’a and Lachlan Lonergan), and three second rows (Darcy Swain, Nick Frost and Caderyn Neville) have all been regular members of the same squad.
The fastest risers of 2022 tell a different story: Mark Nawaqanitawase in the back three, Lalakai Foketi at centre, Jed Holloway on the blind-side flank, Nick Frost and Will Skelton in the second row. Only one of them (Frost) is a Brumby, and he was consistently ranked behind Darcy Swain in the early-season pecking order. The other four are, or were (in Skelton’s case) all from New South Wales.
Don’t get me wrong – no self-respecting supporter of the green and gold would deny the claims of Slipper, ‘triple A’, Frost, Rob Valetini, Pete Samu, Nic White and Len Ikitau to be part of the best 23-man match-day squad Australia can put on the field at the World Cup. Many in that group would deserve to start. But beyond them there should be no sense of entitlement, especially at a time when the most dynamic, fastest-moving coaching current in Australia flows not in Canberra, but in Sydney.
The current Wales tight five is the weakest in two decades, and on Saturday it boasted a 35 and a 37-year-old who are playing rugby from memory. Alun-Wyn Jones and Ken Owens have both been exceptional Hall-of-Famers in their time, but the raw truth is that two ‘greats’ of the professional era are being required to stay on well beyond their sell-by date. Both want to exit with honour, stage left, but there is nobody else comfortable in the spotlight.
They were opposed by an all-Brumby starting tight five, with another man of Canberra (‘Noss’ Lonergan) doing bench duty behind them. This Welsh scrum seldom does more than survive at set-piece, but it still won the scrum penalty count 7-3, with one yellow card against the Wallabies. Wales have not done this to any other international scrummages since the last World Cup:
The technical crux arrived for the Wallaby front row at a succession of five-metre scrums on their own goal-line just before the half-time whistle. Allan Alaalatoa was penalised at two consecutive set-pieces for angling in, with James Slipper stepping out and around on the opposite side. Here is the first instance:
On the third occasion, with ‘Slips’ required to stay straight and no lateral movement permitted, the Australian skipper collapsed and the front row found itself on a general warning.
The ‘walk-around’ technique is a Brumby staple at scrum-time. Here are two examples of it working – first at Cardiff, then a view from the opposite side in the first Bledisloe Cup game against New Zealand in Melbourne:
With the flanker on Tyrel Lomax’s side absent, Slipper is free to drop to one knee, put a hand on the ground, and walk around the tight-head’s right shoulder. That created a picture of domination which the referee chose to reward with a penalty.
Referees, particularly in the northern hemisphere, are now aware of the manoeuvre and tend to police against it, rather than for it. So it was with Englishman Matt Carley in Cardiff:
With Tom Robertson on for his skipper, the third offence of the same ilk draws a yellow card. When the Wallabies finally came back into the game at the set-piece, they did it with three non-Brumbies in the tight five – with Robertson and Sam Talakai at prop and with Holloway at tight-head lock:
This time the Wallaby scrum moves straight forwards rather than sideways first and it reaps the reward from Carley.
One of the forwards missing from that little victory was Caderyn Neville, who was introduced to the squad at the ripe old age of 33 for his first cap against England back in July. At the time, forwards coach Dan McKellar was talking about developing Australia into the best maulers in the world and Neville appeared to be an integral part of the plan:
“It’s a big part of [England’s] DNA, isn’t it? The set-piece and that physicality and brutality, and it’s something we’re trying to bring to this group of forwards.
“We’re trying to develop a mindset here of having the best maul in the world. That takes time, there are five groups of players that come from different franchises and they all do it differently, so the buy-in and thirst for it has been obvious from my end.”
Is it a realistic plan to climb the summit of ‘best maul in the world’, from the base-camp of the Brumbies tight five? Does it sit comfortably with the historical character of creative rugby thinking in Australia?
The evidence suggests that it is an uneasy fit. Neville is never less than whole-hearted in his attitude to the game, but he has struggled to stop mauls throughout the course of his 2022 trial period:
The big Brumby has found himself tail-gating on the edge of mauls, rather than erupting through the centre of them rather too often for comfort, and it was a similar tale at the Principality Stadium:
In the try-scoring play, Neville is right on the ball from at least ten metres out, but he still cannot do anything to affect the play, as the Welsh forwards trot briskly all the way to the goal-line.
Summary
The class-leading, ground-breaking days of Dick Marks and the Australian Institute of Sport in the 1990s now seem like distant memory of the way things were. Leinsterman Rob Kearney was not impressed by the standard of coaching he found in Australia on his two-season sojourn. He has been used to much better fare at home.
For Dave Rennie, 2023 will mean screwing his courage to the sticking point and a shift away from the Brumbies approach, and Brumbies selections in the build-up to the World Cup in France. That approach and those players are uniformly gutsy, tough and resilient but in too many cases, the quality is limited.
‘Brutality’ is an over-reach by way of compensation. The Wallabies were sitting on a minus 22 penalty (won / lost) count from the Rugby Championship, and minus 9 from the end-of-year tour.
The tailor needs better material to work with, and he will find it overseas, with the likes of Will Skelton, Rory Arnold, Brandon Paenga-Amosa in the tight five, and Quade Cooper, Samu Kerevi and Marika Koroibete behind them.
At home, he will be more likely to unearth the real steel of coaching improvement in Sydney rather than Canberra. Players like Angus Bell (if he can return from injury) and Tolu Latu (if he can self-manage, on and off the field) and Charlie Gamble (if he is eligible) can be difference-makers up front; Mark Nawaqanitawase, Lalakai Foketi and one of those young Tahs’ number 10s behind.
With two of his main assistants coming from such a strong Canberra background, it will be a tough ask for Dave Rennie. What kind of team does the man from Upper Hutt want to coach at the World Cup, where will its mana truly lie? Where can he discover the coaching pleasure that Wayne Smith found at the moment he thought that his top-level career was over, with the Black Ferns at the Women’s World Cup?
“It’s all about excitement. They love it. There’s a lot of music on the bus and chatter, I’m just not used to that. They’re not uptight like the men are.
“This is pure joy, and excitement about going out to play.”
If Rennie can find that, he may just rediscover the Australian Way, lying by the side of the same road.