Grand Slam tour: Developing Wallabies should account for Scotland

It’s easy to be wise after the event. We can all post-rationalise Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the White House for example, or the even bigger surprise of the All Blacks’ loss to the Irish in Chicago! But rationale aside, as life’s less certain in the living than perhaps ever before, the threat of an upset or simply not living up to one’s potential is relentless.

That’s why nothing stops the butterflies for a sporting coach. Hours can take days as all roads lead slowly towards kick-off, no matter who you’re playing.

In all instances, the job of a coach is to challenge those feelings, that uncertainty, that awkwardness, the slowness of time, and to twist them in their team’s favour.

The All Blacks’ loss to the Irish was instructive.

Not because the Wallabies are anything like a certainty against Scotland tomorrow morning (AEDT), they’re not. But it is instructive as no one can stay up forever and sometimes, like in the middle of a Grand Slam tour where five weeks play out in slow-mo, performance can dip or focus fracture. And even when that drop may be ever so slight it can be enough to derail your campaign.

Like in the middle of a World Cup where you scrape home 35-34 with a penalty goal on the siren, despite a five tries to three advantage. History plays out on a knife’s edge and on that day it killed the Scots.

Managing the five weeks of this tour is both a personal challenge for the players and a coaching challenge for Michael Cheika.

Personally, it’s attending to the routine, week to week, grooming of a professional player. Get your body right and get your mind right. Some are better at it than others.

As a team, especially one with such inexperienced campaigners as this Wallabies team possesses, much of the onus falls back onto the brains trust of the coaching staff. Get the tactics right and get the collective headspace right. Week in, week out.

Any given week’s preparation shouldn’t hold too many surprises. In fact, ideally it should be 90 per cent linear and only 10 per cent lateral. Anything more and it risks being haphazard and confusing.

The linear is the routine for any game, the lateral is the tactical for this game.

In defence, the linear is the hit and stick, leg drive, shoulder contact, then arms, and the lateral is “we’re going to pincer the five-eighth from the lineout”. Four field sessions, two in the gym is the linear, Rod Macqueen organising a visit to Villiers Bretonneau, the lateral. But there’s a danger in being lateral for the sake of it. Any lateral endeavour must be specific, relevant and clever, and not just clever.

Clever without rationale may be good in theory but no better than a distraction in practice. Leave that for the classroom of old.

The new world demands relevance and is respectful of order. The lateral follows the linear. You must progress forward before you lurch sideways, clean out before going wide, squats before bench curls in the gym, even with summer fast approaching. You have to earn the licence to go lateral, in fact and in thought.

Coaches earn such rights through their connection with their team.

This has been a strength of Cheika’s. To change it up. To manage a season well through the high moods and the low. To build confidence and encourage consistency.

Now, in the shadows of what has been a tough season, and with much still to play for, he and his cohort must keep the Wallabies in the head space they occupied last week.

It cannot be one step forward one back.

In making just the one change to his starting team by bringing in Will Genia, previously unavailable through his commitments to Stade Francais in Paris, he is delivering a consistency of selection so needed.

That selection consistency in the run-on team is the linear. Perhaps the six forwards and two backs bench is the lateral. It certainly signals a desire to blast the Scots out of the contest. Which will be important as, in recent history, Scotland have been the Wallabies’ bogey team of sorts, beating them two times out of the last four where no margin has been greater than six points.

Last week’s effort against Wales was brilliant but occasionally flawed in the high error rate of the Wallabies’ first half.

There’s no putting lipstick on those lapses so the linear this week should focus on finessing those flaws.

The rainbow in the rain for the Wallabies is that they made mistakes having a go, they didn’t make mistakes sitting back on their heels. I’ll take that any day.

For as their skills and confidence develop, they will make fewer and fewer mistakes and hopefully account for a pumped-up Scotland at Murrayfield.