While you are dripping with factor-50 sunscreen and perhaps luxuriating by some glistening stretch of the Mediterranean, with a cooling beverage close at hand, deep in the southern hemisphere, test match rugby is about to get red hot.
With three of the four RWC 2023 semi-finalists playing in the Rugby Championship, the south is once again claiming the bragging rights to global dominance.
While many in France and Ireland are still moaning over the unjust structure of the draw at RWC 2023, which had themselves with New Zealand and South Africa on one side, the southerners counter with that most cerebral of arguments: “Them’s the rules.”
Only the Australians are dragging down the standards of the southern hemisphere. At RWC 2023 the Wallabies hit rock bottom and, astonishingly, they just kept digging.
Lovers of the Wallabies were forced to endure a cringeworthy, B-grade soap opera that was the result of two decades of incompetent governance from consecutive boards in charge of Rugby Australia (RA).
Months before last year’s World Cup, against the wishes of both the Wallaby players and some rugby people on the RA board, then head coach Dave Rennie was removed and replaced with Eddie Jones. The chaos that the rugby people on the RA board had predicted would occur if Jones was appointed came to pass.
Jones sacked the Wallabies talismanic leader Michael Hooper and made massive changes to the staff that created a deep lack of clarity in the team’s game plan literally weeks before the World Cup.
With the experienced leaders left at home, the young players parachuted into the team were not prepared for the rigours of the international game. In the pool matches of RWC 2023 the men in gold were shredded in a record defeat to Wales and a historic loss to Fiji. For the first time in World Cup history, the Wallabies missed the quarter-finals. After promising a four-year rebuild, Jones packed his bags and took off for Tokyo, dumping the Wallabies to coach the Cherry Blossoms.
Enter Joe Schmidt.
Schmidt was not the people’s choice for the role. Australian rugby has suffered from a string of wrongly recruited Kiwis, either as coaches or chief executives, who have disastrously driven the game in Australia so far away from its DNA that players of this generation have lost their understanding of Australian rugby’s unique identity. So it is understandable that the Aussie locals are highly sceptical of yet another New Zealander getting the gig as the Wallabies boss.
When a leading RA official asked me for my opinion of Schmidt coaching the Wallabies, I told him that Schmidt is one of the best coaches I have ever seen but he badly lost his way in 2019. However, good coaches can learn from their errors and I believe that in time Joe will be a huge positive for the Wallabies.
The vast majority of Wallaby supporters do not have the same opinion and they sit firmly in the “Doubting Thomas” category. They need to see a lot of wins before they will believe in Schmidt.
Success will be a struggle for Schmidt because the production line of Australian world-class creative halves has simply stopped.
For half a century the Wallabies were renowned for their exceptional halves that could create space and then exploit it. Nick Farr-Jones, George Gregan, Mark Ella, Michael Lynagh and Stephen Larkham are all-time greats.
Over the past two decades, their legacy has been abandoned by coaches who imposed a Kiwi style of play on to young Australian halves. This has resulted in them losing their understanding of how to play a uniquely Australian style of game.
None of this was of Schmidt’s making but it is his deepest problem. As they say in boxing, you can only punch with the fists you have, and Schmidt can only select the players at his disposal.
Perhaps it will be the introduction of several new trial laws that the world will see for the first time in the Rugby Championship that may slightly negate some of the effects of the Boks tactics.
The long overdue introduction of a 30-second shot clock for the assembly of scrums and lineouts will be implemented. At long last, 40 years after it was first introduced in Australia in the mid-1980s, at scrums the defending scrumhalf will not be allowed to follow the ball through the scrum. Combined, the hope is scrums will assemble faster and the ball will reach the backlines. Both are rare events under the current structures of the laws.
The controversial new red-card law will also be in use. At the officials’ discretion, when a player receives a red card and cannot return to play, he can be replaced after 20 minutes.
These are positive law changes that should have been implemented a decade ago and are a direct reaction to the Springboks’ game plan that is centred around playing the game in brief explosive bursts followed by long periods of inactivity to allow their giant frames to recover. This style of play produces games with minuscule ball-in-play (BIP) times.
A previous match between the Wallabies and the Boks in Adelaide created only 28 minutes BIP time while the recent first test between the Boks and Ireland produced only 30 minutes of BIP time.
These BIP times are totally unacceptable for players, spectators and TV audiences.
Australian rugby supporters are a resilient bunch. Even with the Wallabies being basement dwellers, Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium is a sell-out. Hope springs eternal inside those who love the wattle green and gold jersey.
With all its flaws and logistic improbabilities the Rugby Championship is back, and no matter what they say in the north, the rugby people of the south love it.
