It is a strong contender for the title of the weirdest rugby test in history – or at least the most lunatic finish – but the All Blacks will have noted three key factors in the Wallabies’ shock 42-38 win over the Springboks.
They are:
Gaps in the Boks’ supposedly formidable depth
The importance of the set piece
The critical need to win the kicking game.
The Boks might have created
depth, but making 13 changes from the team that last beat the All Blacks made it clear their B team is no A team.
That might not matter if only a few replacements are required in next year’s World Cup, for example. The Boks’ sense of team seems to stir new players to new heights. However, the South Africans – World Cup champions and the most prolific winners of the World Cup – have occupied such a lofty place in world rugby up to now that any potential weakness is of significant interest to opposing coaches.
There’s still a lot of rugby to be played before the next World Cup in Australia and, at present, you’d have to say that coach Rassie Erasmus will have to depend on his ageing warriors if he is to pull off an unprecedented hat-trick of World Cup wins. However, even when Erasmus opened the bomb doors after about 45 minutes to parachute in his celebrated bomb squad, the Wallabies still managed to put the Boks under pressure, getting the ball wide – doing so (in the second half anyway) with fewer handling errors than the All Blacks during their four-test series against the South Africans.
The Wallabies also held their own at the scrum and won the lineout duel. The bomb squad changed matters – a Wallabies eight that once shunted the Boks back suddenly found itself in the same reverse gear as the All Blacks’ scrum when hooker Malcolm Marx, props Ox Nche and Wilco Louw, lock Lood de Jager and No 8 Jasper Wiese came on in a mass substitution, along with first-choice halfback pairing Morne van den Berg and first five-eighths Sacha Fienberg-Mngomezulu.
Finally – and most importantly – the Australians won the kicking contest with the Boks, a skill at which the All Blacks were decidedly lacking in the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry tour. In terms of recoverable kicks, the Boks put up eight high balls or short kicks, recovering five. The Wallabies put up seven and recovered five. The stats alone don’t reveal the significance of the Australian regathering. Their kick retrievals led to three tries with their back three – Joseph Aukuso-Sua’ali’i, Tom Wright and Max Jorgensen – all prominent.
Sua’ali’i, normally a centre or fullback, was shifted to the wing by coach Les Kiss in a clever move designed to take advantage of his aerial skills. His leap for a high ball rebounded, a bit luckily, straight into the hands of Len Ikitau, who scored.
Wright’s delicate grubber through the Boks defence set Jorgensen away, leading to a prolonged assault and Ben Donaldson’s try just before halftime. Then Jorgensen’s terrific take of a Ryan Lonergan high ball created the momentum and field position for a Wallabies siege that eventually ended with a try to skipper Harry Wilson. South Africa defended desperately but those three kick receipts were ample evidence of the game-breaking nature of retrievable kicks in today’s defence-heavy game.
After 63 minutes and a runaway Jorgensen try, the Wallabies led 42-17 and were only a few minutes away from the manic ending to this test match that stamps it as one of the oddest of all time. What should have been a comfortable Wallaby win turned into near farce.
What followed was two disallowed tries and four Wallabies yellow cards, all brandished within seven minutes. Australia were down to 11 men at one stage. A technology glitch saw Italian referee Andrea Piardi ludicrously forced to use a cellphone to receive the television match official’s (TMO) advice, colouring the end of the match with equal shades of absurdity and horror.
The last 10 minutes of the test took almost 20 minutes with all those stoppages and TMO reviews and, unfortunately, Piardi lost control of the end of the match – not so much in a discipline sense, but offences that previously earned penalties were overlooked in the messy maelstrom of this finish. Rugby has to do something about this. The yellow cards were mostly legitimate (though Sua’ali’i’s was a mystery), but 15 men against 11 is just stupid – though somehow it all managed to be exciting as the Boks almost clawed back the 25-point deficit before running out of time.
The All Blacks’ brains trust will have noted, in particular, the match-winning qualities of regathered kicks from the test. The Wallabies also demonstrated that if the forwards make metres in close (something else the All Blacks struggled to do against the Boks) and move the rucks and mauls forward, the passes tend to stick when going wide.
This win will invest the Australians with all sorts of confidence and, with the All Blacks’ kicking game now a prolonged weakness, the Wallabies have a weapon. A few weeks ago, the Bledisloe Cup looked a foregone conclusion. The Wallabies are now undefeated after six tests. Game on.
Paul Lewis writes about rugby, cricket, league, football, yachting, golf, the Olympics and Commonwealth Games.
