The Wallabies require a hard re-set, and the start of the process must be a honest conversation about “identity" and the "Aussie way".
The concepts became part of Aussie rugby with the arrival of Michael Cheika back at the Waratahs at the end of 2012.
A year earlier Waratahs fans had convinced themselves they were bored, and despite stats showing NSW had the fourth-best attack in Super Rugby, and would go on to play in the finals that season for the fifth time in seven years, supporters wanted more.
At the infamous Waratahs “Fan Forum", people stood up and demanded to be entertained. Less kicking, they said.
When Cheika took over from Michael Foley just over a year later, he rang fans and took the temperature. Their wish-list married up with his Randwick roots, and so began a re-shaping of the way NSW - and eventually the Wallabies - would play rugby.
At his first NSW press conference, Cheika unveiled his plan for the new “identity” of the Waratahs.
"My heritage comes from playing attacking rugby and that's something that I want to do and I don't think you can win big games without scoring tries," said Cheika.
"I come from an attacking background - sometimes to my own detriment - with a bit of the (former English soccer coach) Kevin Keegan era - 'you score one and we'll score two’.”
I've heard all the complaints before but fans did enjoy getting it off their chest at the Waratahs fan forum. Hopefully Tahs react favorably
— Greg Clark (@greg_clarkie) May 19, 2011
Armed with skilful players like Kurtley Beale, Israel Folau, Bernard Foley and Adam Ashley-Cooper, the Waratahs new style worked a treat and NSW won the 2014 Super Rugby title by keeping the ball and running the ball, and kicking the least in the comp.
It required a very good forward pack denting the line, and a very good defence, to work but it worked in a Super Rugby environment that hadn't yet shifted to the stifling defensive game that was increasingly common in the north.
Up a level, the Wallabies were under the more pragmatic Ewen McKenzie, who applied a horses-for-courses tactical approach. McKenzie, who’d deployed the running rugby option in 2011 at the Reds, was a man who built a gameplan to beat the next opponent. His Reds team once kicked almost 40 times against the Brumbies simply to out-do their own relentless kicking game. Queensland won.
The Wallabies were a team on the rise when McKenzie departed suddenly at the end of 2014, and Cheika took over.
In 2015, the national side continued to grow and though it didn’t adopt the full NSW identity, it found a nice medium. There wasn’t yet a run-from-your-own quarter mentality.
Recalling Matt Giteau and Drew Mitchell from France, Cheika ran sequenced plays inside the 22 that ended with a long left boot into touch.
The Wallabies did very well at the 2015 World Cup, with a touch of good fortune, and though the benefits of the Mario Ledesma-powered set-piece were perhaps overlooked, the die was cast: Australia’s identity under Cheika would be to run the ball.
The problem was Test rugby coaches are all smart men and most don’t care two figs about ideology.
They care about winning and Cheika laying his cards face-up on the table made it all too-easy for them to plan for Australia.
Globally, the game became about defensive pressure and when Eddie Jones took over England, they beat the Wallabies 3-0 in a tour of Australia.
In the second Test in Melbourne, Australia attacked with wave after wave of ball-runners and got nowhere. England made 200 tackles to Australia’s 50, and had just 29 per cent possession. But they repelled Australia defensively and then scored points when the Wallabies exposed themselves.
England won 23-7, and the pattern would be repeated time and again over the next four years, right up to the quarter-final exit in Oita.
After the 2016 series, Cheika told reporters: "I’ve always been involved with teams for whom playing footy is part of their identity. That’s the way I want to coach. I know that comes with risk but I’m not scared of that risk. I don’t want us to be reckless in terms of how we play; we’ve just to be better at it.
“It’s about doing your absolute best and letting the cards fall the way they do. They haven’t fallen right for us but you can’t cry about it. All the teams I’ve been involved with as a coach have always played lots of footy; sometimes it doesn’t happen and you get hit on the counter.”
Cheika believed the virtuous running game would triumph over the defensive darkness and as with most coaches in an era focussed on quadrennial World Cup cycles, Cheika then pushed through a largely unsuccessful few seasons with a promise that the style would come good, if the Wallabies - and Australia - believed as much as he did.
It was potent stuff, certainly for the players. Cheika is a passionate, all-in coach, who cares about his players equally as people and athletes.
And he cares passionately about Australian rugby, no doubt.
Only he was on the wrong path tactically and the losses piled up. New Zealand gleefully gobbled up Australia’s ambition to attack from all over the park, knowing it requires almost super-human levels of skill and consistency to work.
The all-attack philosophy also expends massive energy and leads to fractured defensive lines when the ball is turned over. And the Kiwis thumped the Wallabies frequently, running up big scores as Australia compounded their problems by getting looser in attack when down by a few scores.
Cheika is headstrong and gets firmer in his convictions when others doubt him, so the belief in an attacking “identity” only grew in all those losses. We just need to get better at it, Cheika would say often.
But Test rugby is a contest of pressure and Cheika’s ball-in-hand attack, while entertaining and even admirable to a point, was rarely enough to be effective for long periods. Defensive systems are too strong these days and teams would wait for turnovers, and take their points via Australian error.
Turnover tallies were routinely near 20 and the Wallabies routinely gifted rivals cheap, barely-earned points.
Australia’s strategy to exit their own quarter by running the ball and not kick, often gave opposition teams a free entry into the Wallabies redzone. As seen even in Oita.
When asked about opposition teams, Cheika would routinely say he didn’t study the opposition. It was part mind games stuff, but the concept of breaking down an opponent by making them play, and waiting for their mistakes, wasn’t on Cheika’s radar.
For the last four years under Cheika, the risks have been all taken by the Wallabies.
And stats show, in the end, it didn’t pay.
In the four years between the 2012 and 2016, the more pragmatic Deans-McKenzie-Cheika Wallabies won 59 per cent of games, averaging 24.3 points in attack and 21.2 points in defence.
In the last four years, the Wallabies’ all-out attack Cheika Wallabies scored an average 24.7 points but at a cost of 25.7 points in defence. And the win rate went down to 47.1 per cent.
So for 0.3 points improvement per game in attack, Australia paid the defensive price of an extra 4.5 points conceded.
After what will almost certainly be his final game as Test coach, Cheika was asked if Australia were tactically off given how they knew how England would play.
"Listen, that’s the way we play footy,” Cheika said.
"I am not going to go to a kick and defend game. Call me naive but that’s not the way we do it. I’d rather win it our way or no way. That’s the way Aussies want us to play.”
An experienced English rugby writer later asked an Aussie media member: “I don’t understand. Wouldn’t Aussies rather that they win?”
Of course, the answer is yes.
The notion that Australians are so enamoured with running rugby they’d happily lose a game, let alone a World Cup playoff, if it is end-to-end is rubbish.
Australians want success and the lack of it does far more damage to the game, and to a disenchanted fan base, than the peculiar phrase “winning ugly”.
In some countries, there is no such thing as an ugly win. It is just a win. And all wins are beautiful.
Australia’s golden era of success in the late 90s-early noughties had plenty of wins with rough-looking heads.
The success of that era was based on the Wallabies being regarded the smartest team in the world.
Their “identity" was application of a variety means of pressure - be it ball-in-hand, kicking, defensive, set-piece, scoreboard - and it kept rivals guessing, wins piling up and the fans happy. They out-thought their rivals and outplayed them.
No-one remembers that the Wallabies averaged only two tries a game in the tier one matches in the 1999 World Cup. Only that they won it.
The hard re-set of the Wallabies must have one goal: to playing winning rugby again. Simple.
By all the avenues available to a rugby team, and applied with on-the-day common sense.
Style is fine, but without substance it's meaningless.
