Last weekend, as I watched the Wallabies implode in a shambolic performance, I was struck by the absence of so many basic skills from the Australian players that produced a torrent of unforced errors. So many that it made cohesion and success impossible.
The Wallabies could not impose their gameplan on Wales because they were not in control of their own individual actions.
The Wallabies’ performance was the end result of years of failure by Australia’s high performance coaching system. This was a team that was under prepared for elite international rugby because the systems below the national team had not adequately educated the players.
Ireland are the exact opposite. The Irish national team is the huge beneficiary of an excellent system that supplies a stream of well-coached, highly-prepared players into it.
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All of those who were educated inside the magnificent Australian rugby system of the past could see that the hard-won knowledge of so many generations of Australian rugby players and coaches has not been passed on to these players.
There has been a procession of ignorant administrators who refused to listen to those who warned of this approaching rugby apocalypse in Australia. The flow of knowledge from the past to the present has stopped.
The end result of this folly was last week’s humiliation.
When I was 19 and in my first year in the senior grades at Eastwood Rugby Club in Sydney I first learned of the power of intergenerational coaching knowledge. Finally wearing the same jersey as my father and uncle, I was feeling very grown up. In reality, I was an uneducated kid because I did not know what I did not know.
I had the great fortune to have John Ballesty as my club coach. A boyhood hero of mine, John had become a Wallaby playing for Eastwood. In the brilliant Australian system at the time, John was coaching the clubs 1st XV, while I and all the other young bucks were scrapping it out in the 3rds, fighting to climb the ladder.
It was a tough school. The competition for places was fiercely contested with no quarter given. It was a system that produced winners.
One night at training John took me aside and told me that in attack my feet were all wrong. In my ignorance, I thought “What have my feet got to do with running rugby?” As it turned out, a lot.
He showed me that if you face your scrumhalf with your outside shoulder up and your toes pointing at the number nine, your first step will always be straight forward. That means you become an attacking threat. Your defender has to stay on you and not slide on to the next attacker. This is the exact technique that Johnny Sexton utilises that makes him such a potent attacker.
It was a three minute conversation, from a wise coach to a young player. Forty years on and John’s advice remains the correct starting position for all individual attackers. Somewhere in the past, another wise old rugby player must have taught John these maxims in his development.
Essential intergenerational knowledge that had gone down through the decades and across the rugby community into my then almost empty bank of rugby knowledge. Sadly this same knowledge has not reached the Wallabies.
Against Wales, many of the Wallaby attackers ran across the field because their starting foot positioning was wrong. They were not fixing defenders by firstly running straight. Such basic, 101 intergenerational knowledge that was taught to young third graders appears to have been lost to the elite in the Australian game.
Like my 19-year-old self, the Wallabies only know what they know. What they don’t know is a long and depressing list. At the top is a lack of skills at the scrums, lineouts, attacking systems, defensive systems, kicking and the breakdown. The Wallabies’ lack of aggression, awful body language, poor leadership and absence of old fashioned mongrel dog attitude, tells us that many mental skills are also missing from this generation of players.
Which again is the exact opposite of what we see in the Irish players. Yet the Irish and Australian player pathways are almost identical. Players start in schools or juniors, before moving to senior clubs, then provinces and finally the national team. So the playing pathway is not Australia’s problem. It is what is taught, or more precisely what is not taught, inside the system that is the key.
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When I arrived in Ireland from coaching the Waratahs in 1999, Australia were World Champions. The foundation of that winning Wallaby team was technical excellence. At the 1999 RWC Ireland were technically shambolic and lost to the Pumas in the quarter-finals.
Since that time Ireland have risen to the top because they have created a high performance pathway powered by technically superb coaching that has generated success at Under-20s, provincial and national levels, that 20 years ago was almost unimaginable.
The obsession with pedagogy – that is the process of how we educate – has been prioritised above educating coaches with technical content which is a major contributing factor to the Wallabies’ failure. Eddie Jones must take some responsibility for the Wallabies’ poor performances, but the root cause is the failure in the standards across the Australian coaching system.
A lack of technical coaching knowledge has resulted in producing less technically skilled players. The long-term result is that the individual Wallaby players are currently, technically, the worst tier one team I have witnessed.
The decline of Australian rugby can only be described as catastrophic self destruction.
Irish rugby should look at the Wallabies as a cautionary tale. Intergenerational rugby knowledge and technically excellent coaching remains the foundation of international success.
