When the 1971 British and Irish Lions were on their way to New Zealand, they stopped over in Sydney to play NSW in a warm-up game. At the after-match reception . . . in those days a regular knees-up of the amateur era . . . I found myself at the bar with the celebrated Irish prop Ray McLoughlin.
A university graduate with an academic bent, McLoughlin was renowned as a deep-thinking rugby technician who revolutionised the scrum and played a huge part in delivering the Lions’ first series win against the All Blacks.
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As we conversed at the bar all those years ago, the subject was rugby intellect, the thinking necessary to make a successful team, and the attitudes required to put that thinking to best use.
Within that Lions team there were other approaches of course. Their outstanding lock forward Willie John McBride, for instance, reckoned the only way to beat the All Blacks was to fight fire with fire. He exhorted his teammates to “kick the shit out of them”.
The Wallabies have had two weeks to think about how they might approach the All Blacks in Sydney this weekend, and given the capitulation that saw Argentina score seven second-half tries against them in Santa Fe, it would not have been a happy contemplation.
But a fair bit of the McLoughlin approach, and a measured helping of the McBride outlook too, would not go astray.
McLoughlin’s contention was that the most intelligent player on the paddock had to be the tight-head prop. Maybe so, maybe not, but he certainly was right in that Rugby is a game to be played in the mind as much as anywhere else. Attitudes developed and conveyed tend to shape a game.
In Argentina a couple of weeks back Australia looked good early because they played with aggression and confidence. Their loose head prop Angus Bell may or may not be a modern-day Ray McLoughlin, but the way he motored for the run that set up Australia’s first try said to everybody, not least his team-mates, that the Wallabies had the spine to do good things.
When he and his front-row partner Taniela Tupou left half way through the game, the Wallabies simply were a different side.
Having watched a few All Blacks-Wallabies Tests since my first in 1957, some things stand out in the way Australia has at times stood up to the All Blacks.
There was the inimitable Ray Price, whose ‘Cumberland Throw’ on the All Black champion Ian Kirkpatrick, twice, at the SCG in 1974, is a case in point.
Levered over his hip in a move Price alone perfected, Kirkpatrick went down like a bag of spuds and the All Blacks were seriously displeased.
But it was a clear message to both teams that reputation meant nothing and the Wallabies would compete. And Kirkpatrick understood . . . he sought out Price later to offer congratulations.
By the 1980s, when Australia was making a serious bid for world No.1 status, the Argentine prop Enrique ‘Topo’ Rodriguez had joined the fray.
In 1986 at Auckland’s Eden Park, Australia were under some pressure when the All Black hooker Hika Reid snatched the ball a few metres from the lIne and charged. It looked like a try for all money.
Rodriguez took him head-on at pace, lifted him, drove him back a metre and more and back-slammed him.
The game from that point took on a different tenor and Australia clinched the Bledisloe series 22-9 . . . still their last win on Eden Park.
It was a tackle for the ages, born of Topo’s dedication to the scrum, which had built power in his legs, but also an attitude born of winners.
Then there was Phil Kearns, and the indelible image of him hovering over his rival hooker Sean Fitzpatrick after a scrum had collapsed at Athletic Park in 1990.
We don’t know what was said (and probably could not repeat it here anyway) but it was said with force and with spirit, and again set the tone for a match Australia won handsomely.
Now none of these things was life-changing in isolation, but they have stuck in my head as fleeting but symbolic occasions when the message was clear . . . you blokes don’t scare us.
We can throw in George Gregan’s deflating comment to the All Black scrum-half Byron Kelleher in Sydney in 2003 as a World Cup semi-final wound down in Australia’s favour, and the Blacks were out of it. ‘Four more years boys . . . four more years.’
All of these things defined a certain confidence . . . a mental strength that Australia commanded in large measure through the end of the amateur era and the early stages of professionalism, when for a period of some 15 years we led the world.
That success was born of systems put in place in the amateur era, but largely abandoned when the game went pro and bankers, entrepreneurs and marketing gurus took charge and chased short term goals.
In Argentina the Wallabies had available 33 players for two games . . . a coaching and support staff as long as your arm, a bank of computers in the coaching box . . . and on the field sheer confusion.
There are reasons we find ourselves where we are, not least the evaporation of the player supply from a once great public school system that has more or less dried up.
But if we allow concentration and confidence to drift against the All Blacks as they did against Argentina, if we ignore so fundamental a principle as applying defensive pressure as we did at Santa Fe, we are in for an unpleasant afternoon.
To revert to the ancient ethos of 1974 for a moment, when the second Test of that All Black tour took place in Brisbane, the Australian coach of the time Bob Templeton asked his team leaders at a pre-game meeting how they should go about things. The vice-captain Stu MacDougall had a simple approach.
“Let’s go the biff at the first lineout,” he said. “One in, all in.” The first lineout came and went without incident and Ray Price, clearly disappointed, challenged MacDougall as to why no biff. Second lineout it was on for young and old.
Now that was half a century ago and you can’t do that sort of thing these days, and nobody suggests we should, even if we could. But it did define a certain attitude. A certain confidence. A refusal to brook inferiority.
Australia drew that second Test against the All Blacks 16-16. It was a good recommendation for a positive state of mind . . . for not going quietly. It is an approach on which today’s Wallabies will have reflected long and hard after the horrors of Santa Fe.
