British and Irish Lions countdown: Why Schmidt is now the most important man in rugby

Coach must accelerate Australia’s revival to give fans the Lions series they crave – and the autumn tour gives us real hope of a good fight in 2025

Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt.

With their courageous last-ditch defensive efforts, their bodies on the line and a strict “they shall not pass” ethic that was mathematically unnecessary anyway because Australia were too far behind to challenge for the victory, Scotland completed an impressive November campaign as the autumn’s big party poopers.

By playing sensible rugby, with a co-ordinated defensive plan and an intelligent understanding of when it was right to play and when it was not, Scotland put an end to the fallacy that, in just a matter of weeks, the Wallabies had hauled themselves from a position where they were falling off the edge of the world to a place where they were in sight of the top of it.

It does, now, seem an awfully long time ago but, yes, last Monday morning (AEDT), people had been genuinely talking of an Australian autumn grand slam. They – OK, we of the home unions – were dredging up tales of the famous grand slammers of 1984 and wondering if this could possibly be a repeat performance. All of it now clearly nonsense.

Scotland were the party poopers because by being careless (England) or hopeless (Wales), we had been presented with an illusion of a British & Irish Lions tour next summer that was going to be bristling, competitive and hilariously entertaining with those beautifully athletic, naturally gifted Wallabies giving it a crack at every opportunity. However, Scotland decided to behave like grown-ups and thus laid down the blueprint to stop any such festivities breaking out.

There was a shopping list of details, in Edinburgh, that England had completely missed two weeks previously at Twickenham: don’t allow the Wallabies to indulge their appetite for short balls off either side of the ruck, mark the short chip over, shut down space for their runners and don’t allow them to go round you. But, most importantly, make a comprehensive victory of the possession battle, because if you control that then you stop the game getting loose and they suddenly look average.

Schmidt with James Slipper.

Even in the first quarter at Murrayfield, when Australia were actually winning the possession battle, they struggled for a line break. They looked weirdly tamed, which, after scoring 13 tries in the previous two weeks, was something of a surprise to many – though apparently not the Scots themselves.

Sione Tuipulotu, Scotland’s impressive captain, said they had never actually seen this as the 50-50 game most had predicted. They had expected to win, he said, and there was no arrogance in his claim. “We don’t feel they’ve played a defensive team like us,” he said. And then he further explained Australia hadn’t played “an attacking team like us”, either.

Gregor Townsend, the head coach, put Scotland’s 27-13 victory in perspective by insisting that encouraging as this 14-point success had been, Scotland’s better performance had actually come in the 17-point defeat by South Africa.

All of which makes Joe Schmidt arguably the most important man in world rugby next year. That’s not because an imbalanced Lions series is some kind of existential threat, despite what someone out there will inevitably claim. We in the media get so captivated by the Lions that you can bet that one of us, at some point, will claim that unless we get a close contest, the Lions’ future is in peril. Well it’s not and it won’t be. It’s all more straightforward than that: it’s simply that a hard-fought Lions series is one of the most delicious events known to man.

So we need Joe. In the bowels of Murrayfield, in the aftermath of Australia’s defeat by Scotland, Australia’s head coach shared some insight into the direction of travel for his group of players.

“I think they’re starting to believe in themselves,” he said, adding: “I don’t think necessarily that they did initially. It was a little bit of a deflated situation initially.”

That the team he inherited was short on self-belief is, perhaps, not entirely surprising, though it is a little unusual to say so as bluntly as this. What was more striking here was that when Schmidt said they were starting to believe, Harry Wilson, his captain next to him, nodded sagely, almost as if he was nodding to himself.

Aussie fans travelled to Murrayfield to see Australia’s first loss on their European tour.

That is the first job done and it is an important one because his Wallabies had taken two big strides forward on this tour before they took another one back in Edinburgh. They are unlikely to make significant progress in their final tour game against Ireland in Dublin on Saturday because you can be sure that Andy Farrell, the Ireland head coach, will have that shopping list in his back pocket, thank you.

“I always said from the start it would never be linear,” Schmidt said. “Because high performance – it just isn’t. There is going to be days where it doesn’t go as well as you’d like it to go.”

All too true, but the issue for Schmidt is that there aren’t many days left. His Wallabies play Ireland at Aviva Stadium in Dublin on Sunday (2.10am AEDT), then they have the one warm-up game next summer before going straight into the Lions series, with the first Test in Brisbane on July 19. Schmidt has thus been masterminding a rapid revival project.

Eddie Jones attempted the same thing before him, going into last year’s World Cup, and he made a cataclysmic mess of it. Schmidt has stripped it even further back than Jones did in order to find the way forward – he has given 18 players their debut this year, which is more than any Wallabies coach has done since 1928. The trouble he has is that he isn’t going to find any more players between now and next summer. It’s already too late for late developers.

His final assessment of the year is the perfect one: in Dublin, Schmidt back home on old turf, Schmidt versus Farrell, the Wallabies coach versus next year’s Lions coach.

It was suggested to him in Edinburgh that he was so warmly remembered in Ireland he would be “love-bombed” on arrival there. He sidestepped that suggestion – “I don’t know about being love-bombed” – because he hasn’t got time for romance. He knows his return home is likely to be another reality check. We are thus seeing how quickly a smart man can work. After Scotland have done this to you, how nimbly can you respond?

“I think we’re building a little bit of momentum,” he said. Well, yes, you are, but you need a lot more.

“What I’m hoping is people see it as a real contest next July,” he said.

THE TIMES