Rugby World Cup: Michael Cheika’s naive game plan had been long worked out
Michael Cheika stuck stubbornly to naive, brain-dead tactics every other coach knew were a failure.
It was always going to come to this, always, always. Rugby might be about passion and fervour and brute physicality but it is also about cunning and guile, and these were skills Michael Cheika never could communicate to the Wallabies.
He and the Wallabies predictably came to grief as everyone knew they would, out-thought, out-planned, outmanoeuvred by a master coach, Eddie Jones. Except that a master coach wasn’t really required.
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Cheika’s simple brand of rugby had long ago been broken down, analysed and dissected. Jones was but one of a number of coaches — Steve Hansen, Joe Schmidt, Warren Gatland, Gregor Townsend and Rassie Erasmus — who had realised that if enough pressure was applied to Australia and their ball-in-hand approach, something would give.
Something gave in Oita on Saturday.
The Wallabies handed England two gift intercept tries. The rest England managed by themselves, inflicting on Australia their worst defeat in World Cup history. That’s taking nothing away from the courage the Wallabies displayed, their stubbornness in sticking to the game plan they were given.
But there was a time when the Wallabies would boast that if they could win 40 per cent of possession, they would win. This time they won 63 per cent and all it achieved was to set them up for disaster. The more ball they won, statistically, the more errors they would make. They made twice as many carries as England (151 to 71) but committed twice as many handling errors (12 to 5). They turned over possession 18 times to England’s eight. It’s almost as though the numbers are telling a tale.
England’s defence was mostly untroubled and right from the moment the Australians opened with 18 phases before Christian Lealiifano knocked on, one could almost sense Jones realising the worst was over.
The Australians had nothing to hurt them with. With all that ball, they only made one more line break (eight to seven). And they even obligingly helped England out with field position. By not recognising the situation for the clear and present danger it was, they kept running the ball out in front of their own posts. I recall asking Cheika a question at a press conference in Tokyo, begging him to explain this stubborn tactic which so clearly was asking for trouble.
“It hasn’t gotten us into trouble so far,” he replied. Well, on Saturday it did.
Cheika claimed that day and again in the press conference that followed the Wallabies’ quarter-final exit that this is what the Australian public wanted to see, creative, running rugby. Trouble is, the Wallabies weren’t at all creative. None of their three five-eighths, Christian Lealiifano, Matt Toomua or Bernard Foley, displayed so much as a scintilla of genuinely creative play.
What the public wants to see is winning rugby. Give them win after win after win and when finally they have had their fill of winning, then they might start clamouring for running rugby. But to stick mulishly to a brand of rugby that would deliver just 25 wins in 59 matches against Tier One nations — including Italy and Argentina — gave new meaning to “glutton for punishment”.
“Listen, that’s the way we play footy,” Cheika told the post-match press conference. “I’m not going to a kick-and-defend game. Maybe call me naive but that’s not what I’m going to do. I’d rather win our way …
“That’s the way Aussies want us to play. That’s it.”
OK then.
Naive!
It was difficult to tell at times whether Cheika was clever pretending to be stupid — I would like to think it was this one — or stupid pretending to be clever. But the result was that, either way, the Wallabies ended up playing a brand of brain-dead rugby.
Observe the number of times a Hansen or a Jones would sing the praises of Michael Hooper and David Pocock, knowing full well that the Pooper option was no longer working.
“For the past decade Pocock has been the leading flanker in world rugby,” said Jones, laying it on. He is a brilliant player but something — perhaps the way match officials were refereeing the breakdown — was reducing his effectiveness. But instead of recognising that and acting accordingly, Cheika acted as though it was a capital crime to even contemplate changing his role.
Everyone knew that Cheika’s time was over. He knew it as well and on Sunday the cards all played out.
He had a vision of how he saw Test rugby being played and he pursued it relentlessly, long after it had ceased to be realistic. Winning two of his last 13 matches against Home Union countries should have told him it wasn’t just New Zealand that had worked Australia out.
He may have been too closely involved to take a wood-from-the-trees approach. But Rugby Australia shouldn’t have been. And yet, having been told by any number of experts that the Wallabies could not win the World Cup under Cheika, they reaffirmed him in his position a year ago. They were told at the time they were burning a World Cup campaign. And if the only justification they could find was that they couldn’t afford to pay him out, then perhaps they should examine their own lavish budget for flying people to and from Japan. It’s a game they’re administering, not a social event.
It was a bad decision made in the knowledge that in a year Rugby Australia would be rid of him. The only problem was that an entire World Cup lay in between.
Now they are planning a review to be headed by Rugby Australia’s director of rugby, Scott Johnson. Yet all the major rugby decisions made this year have borne Johnson’s stamp of approval. He was, as well, a member of the three-man selection panel along with Cheika and Michael O’Connor. So presumably he must have concurred with Cheika’s reasoning or at least found it plausible enough to go along with. He is a good man, Scott Johnson, but he shouldn’t be leading a review into a situation he helped create.
It’s been argued that Johnson perhaps put himself on the selection committee so that he could monitor Cheika. Fair enough. But now it is job done. Now he must remove himself from the panel.
Johnson is lucky. He arrived too late in proceedings to be blamed for Cheika but he has been here long enough to gain a degree of credit for the Junior Wallabies reaching the final of the under-20 World Cup and the under-18s — the former Australian Schoolboys — taking down their NZ counterparts. So perhaps the door to a brighter future already is opening.
But that was a World Cup Australia will never get back.
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