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Leroy Houston of the Reds is tackled by Francois Louw of the Stormers during the Super 14 Rugby Union match between the Queensland Reds and the Stormers in Brisbane, Australia, Friday, April 23, 2010. AP Photo/Tertius Pickard
Hands up all the readers who took the Stormers to defeat the Reds in the tipping competitions? My hand is up. I believed that the all round game of the Stormers, with its strong pack, its devastating forward ball runners and the power and pace of Bryan Habana out wide, would be far too much for the Reds.
Oh ye of little faith.
Before the match, however, I did say to son Zac, the publisher of The Roar, that if the Reds could defeat the Stormers they could go all the way and win the title. And the reason for that was that I believed that the Stormers were the best team in the tournament.
So a side that defeats the Stormers at this stage in the tournament must be rated as a potential title-winner in its own right.
I know it is difficult to extrapolate from selected individual matches to propose a general theory, but this theorising is part of the fun of sport. Who would have thought that at the start of the season an article with a headline like this one could be written.
What impressed me most about the victory over the Stormers was the fact that it was achieved with the Stormers playing well and the Reds, by their standards, not playing as well as they have in the past. Good sides, tournament-winning sides in fact, find a way of winning even when they are off their game.
And this certainly applied to Quade Cooper early on. He made several (uncharacteristic) mistakes right at the beginning of the match, missed shots at goal and kicked too much for my liking.
This kicking reminded me that when Ewen McKenzie coached the NSW Waratahs they tended to go into their shell for the must-win matches, especially finals. But to their credit, Cooper and the Reds (and McKenzie?) re-discovered their ball-in-hand game and should really at the finish have been awarded a second try to Will Genia which would have deprived the Stormers of a bonus point.
The Reds have an historically tough match next weekend when they travel to Canberra to play the Brumbies. In the history of Super Rugby the Reds are yet to win at Canberra. They have defeated the Brumbies only once since 1996.
These sorts of hoodoos are hard to break. But sooner or later (later in this case, obviously) the hoodoo is broken. I expect the Reds to do this next week.
They will be helped, presumably, by the gossip that all is not well in the Brumbies camp. The Sunday Telegraph carried an item that coach Andy Friend and the Wallaby captain had a spat at training in front of the whole team.
Whatever all this means, the fact is that the Brumbies have under-performed this season. They never looked like scoring very often against the NSW Waratahs. Ironically, the one try they did score by Adam Ashley-Cooper, who did a superb job in protecting the ball as he spun over and over, without his knees touching the ground, was denied by a touch-judge who ruled on something he did not see and a referee who should have asked the video referee to adjudicate.
There was some conjecture in the press box whether referee Steve Walsh could have sent the incident up to the video referee for adjudication on whether Cooper had correctly grounded the ball. This involved a ‘double-movement’ issue which the video referee would have ruled out and allowed a try.
The Waratahs got their victory. But it was totally unimpressive. They lack any penetration in the back line, without Rob Horne. Horne gives them some energy on attack that opens up defences for the big forwards to run through.
I intensely dislike, too, the ‘win ugly’ mentality of the Waratahs. They do not try to provide entertainment for their loyal supporters. At the ANZ Stadium they drew the largest Australian crowd of the tournament, 40,271 spectators. But there was no attempt, especially towards the end of the game when the Brumbies were out on their feet, for the Waratahs to step up the action and finish their opponents off, and entertain the spectators.
In my view, this lack of urgency to score tries and a sort of work-to-rule meandering through a game, means that the Waratahs have not got the enterprise or spirit or playing style to defeat the very good sides which will contest the finals.
There is always time for some redemption from all of this. But the Waratahs have only a handful of games to establish the all-field, ball-in-hand game that a champion team needs this season.
Will the Waratahs lift their game to blow the Highlanders away? If they do I might just put my hand up (perhaps) as a hopeful rather than a true Blue believer.