FEATURE Why the Wallabies were always destined to fail

Eddie Jones has finally fallen on his sword and resigned as the head coach of the Wallabies. It would be a stretch to call it the honourable way out for a man posting only two wins in nine attempts in a World Cup year, but the notion of honourable action in Australian rugby packed its bags and headed for the hills a long, long time ago.

Jones’ background refrain had been an acceptance of ‘full responsibility for performances on the field’, but increasingly it has sounded like a siren-song, pulling the genuine, but unwary supporter of Aussie rugby into shore, only to be dashed on the rocks of a subtle shifting of the blame.

At the Coogee homecoming presser after Australia’s inglorious World Cup exit, it was very much the system to blame:

“You’ve got a team that was struggling for a period of time, you’ve got underneath it a system that’s not supporting it and at some stage you bottom out.”

Two days before Jones resigned, he was still selling the same story:

“Look, I take responsibility for the bad results. But I don’t take responsibility for 20 years of decline of Australian rugby. And that’s what’s trying to be pinned on me: 20 years of decline.”

It had all been so different at the beginning of 2023. RA chairman Hamish McLennan could scarcely contain his glee at scoring the ‘coup of the year’ by hiring Jones just after he had been sacked by the RFU. There was nothing to restrict his employment back home:

“When we heard there was a non-compete [clause], we said: ‘Really?’

“There is no way I wanted someone like Eddie to go to one of my big competitors.

“His global knowledge of the game and our opposing sides is second to none. We didn’t want a rampaging Eddie on the loose.”

Eddie was going to give the All Blacks a bit of hurry-up in the Bledisloe and Australia stood a great chance of winning the World Cup. Only three weeks before the World Cup in France began, with Australia having failed to chalk up a single ‘W’ in the first four matches of the new Eddie Jones era, McLennan was still doubling down on his big gamble:

“He’s an excellent coach, he’s one of the world’s best coaches. He’s got three teams into the final of the World Cup, a 73 per cent win-rate with England, anyone who goes against Eddie is foolish.”

What was the underlying issue behind Australia’s dismal performance at the 2023 World Cup? In a phrase, ‘lack of experience’.

By the time the Wallabies had been routed by Wales in their key Pool C game, 40 points to 6, both men had been proven as wrong as it is possible to be in their rugby judgements. It mattered not one whit. McLennan again, upon return to Australian shores:

“I think we are better than we were three years ago, even though the World Cup performance was terrible… We inherited a bit of a burning mess.

“Whether Eddie was the right call or not, I think that’s almost irrelevant now – because the system’s broken, and we need to fix it.”

As an exercise in passing the buck or burying your head in the sand, that was as masterful as it gets.

What was the underlying issue behind Australia’s dismal performance at the 2023 World Cup? In a phrase, ‘lack of experience’. Although he has been three years in the job as RA chairman, Hamish McLennan has no previous rugby experience – his background is in digital advertising and the media, and he was an executive vice-president at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

Eddie Jones is perhaps the most experienced elite-level head coach in the world, but much more attention needed to be paid to the group of assistant coaches he would be able to recruit to work with him before he was hired. One of the main reasons for Jones losing his job with England was the deterioration of his support staff after the tournament in Japan. After the high watermark of reaching the 2019 World Cup final, all of John Mitchell, Scott Wisemantel and Steve Borthwick fell by the wayside, one by one, and their replacements were never of the same calibre.

Dave Rennie’s excellent support group scattered like alarmed seagulls on an MCG cricketing outfield after Jones’ arrival: Wisemantel withdrew into the shadows of casual consultancy, Laurie Fisher bounced back to the Brumbies, and Dan McKellar took up a plum role as the head coach of Leicester Tigers in England.

Eddie was left trying to fit square pegs into round holes: Dan Palmer (a scrum coach) overseeing the lineout, Brad Davis (a defence coach) directing the attack; a French defensive expert (Pierre-Henri Broncan) coaching the maul. There was a league specialist (Brett Hodgson) doing defence against the background of a short tenure as kicking coach at the Sale Sharks in the north of England. Davis then left the group unexpectedly, only a fortnight before the tournament was due to start. You did not need to look further than that to observe a burning mess, a volcano primed to explode.

If there was one item that Eddie Jones needed on his World Cup selection menu, it was some wise old heads in the playing group. In early Wallabies training sessions, the likes of Allan Ala’alatoa, James Slipper, Jed Holloway and Michael Hooper were identified as forward leaders, along with Nic White and Andrew Kellaway in the backline. Quade Cooper may have been missing from the snapshots taken at the time, but he had been earmarked as a part of that group.

By the end of the World Cup, Jones had burned his way through six skippers – Hooper, Slipper, Ala’alatoa, Tate McDermott, Will Skelton and Dave Porecki – and all of the leadership group had dropped from sight. Ala’alatoa was injured, Slipper and White were relegated to bench duty, while Hooper, Cooper and Holloway were all left out of the World Cup squad entirely. Despite a succession of top-quality performances, Kellaway was reduced to playing musical chairs with Ben Donaldson for possession of the No 15 jersey.

The host of young Wallabies Jones had assembled had no shoulder to lean on, and no words of sage advice to trust.

Australia were never going to be good enough to establish a clear ascendancy over either Wales or Fiji in Pool C, and they badly needed that veteran leadership to push them through the sticky moments that would undoubtedly occur in those key games. But when they arrived, the host of young Wallabies Jones had assembled had no shoulder to lean on, and no words of sage advice to trust.

Some picks were never explained or justified by performances out on the paddock. Five-cap Pone Fa’amausili was selected as one of three tightheads for the tournament, despite spending the entire Super Rugby Pacific season for his club the Melbourne Rebels sitting behind Sam Talakai on the bench. The Rebels’ coaching staff clearly understood Fa’amausili was not ready for SRP scrums, let alone Test-matches, but Eddie knew better.

Jones’ chickens came home to roost versus Wales in the crucial Pool C decider. The shift of 131-cap James Slipper across to the starting tighthead berth was well-founded, and Australia won two of the three scrum penalties awarded with him on the field in the first period:

It is basically a case of ‘rinse-and-repeat’ at both set-pieces. As soon as his opponent Gareth Thomas tries to move up the side of the scrum, Slipper feels it and drills straight through the seam between the loosehead and his hooker. Penalty Australia.

But when Slipper was replaced by Fa’amausili in the second half, all the advantage at scrum-time that Slipper had carefully nurtured was casually thrown away. Before the game, the Wallabies scrum coach Neal Hatley had attempted to justify Fa’aumasili’s selection: “He is our most improved player. For a guy who didn’t start regularly for the Rebels, to be doing what he’s doing at the moment – it’s phenomenal.” Like so many media utterances of the comeback era, it fell on stony ground when it mattered. Against Fa’amausili, Gareth Thomas suddenly started to look like a world-beater:

On both occasions, the Melbourne giant is too high to be able to deliver the same kind of impact as Slipper, and Thomas burrows underneath his right shoulder to drive the scrum forward and draw the penalty. Australia lost the scrum penalty count 4-0 (including one free-kick) with Fa’amausili on for Slipper, and we know just how important scrum penalties were in the critical games of the World Cup 2023.

Likewise, Eddie Jones’ faith in Rory Arnold’s twin brother Richie was never explained or justified by performances out on the field. It may be impossible tell them apart on the paddock by looks alone, but their output is chalk-and cheese: Rory is one of the premier lineout players and maul-stoppers in the world, but his brother never provided the necessary starch in lineout defence:

The most basic tenet of maul defence is that you begin by positioning your best maul-stopper opposite the receiver, so that he can infiltrate through the middle of the blocking front. That is where Rory – and others like Jed Holloway – excel, but Richie was lost out on the edge – a peripheral rather than an influential figure. In both cases, the Wallabies No 5 and Australia’s biggest man, is nowhere near the thick of the action, but taking a ride along the side of the drive.

It all ended with the Wallabies conceding a close-range try against one of the most moderate tight fives fielded during Warren Gatland’s dozen years in charge of Wales:

There is no Gethin Jenkins, no Adam Jones and Alun-Wyn Jones involved in this lineout surge, but Wales do not need them. You had to rub your eyes just to believe it was really happening.

Perhaps the most eloquent comment after the event came from the voice of Wallabies outside-half Bernard Foley on Twitter [now ‘X’]: “It didn’t have to be like this!” Indeed it did not. The most damning aspect of Australia’s entire 2023 World Cup was an abandonment of the value of experience and proven leadership which was well-nigh inexplicable.

Hamish McLennan had no ‘previous’, no prior rugby background, and Eddie Jones’ own extensive experience was fatally compromised by a glaring lack of the same quality in his raft of support coaches. Jones then compounded the problem by shearing away all the experienced leadership in the World Cup playing group. It was like cutting the head off Australia’s on-field IQ. The Wallabies were playing ‘blind’, and when Eddie finally swung around to debating the issue (indirectly) with Quade Cooper he lost the argument hands-down.

In reply to Eddie’s comment that the likes of Cooper and Michael Hooper “…were [not] the right role models for the team going forward. You need guys… who are obsessed with winning, obsessed with being good, and those three are past those stages”, Quade eloquently reminded Eddie of the priority of ‘process’ over ‘obsession’:

“The way I view winning and success is through preparation. No outcome is guaranteed, but what you can guarantee is the work and preparation you put in. You know that you have given yourself and your team the best possible opportunity to win…

“Confidence does not come from knowing the outcome; it comes from knowing that you’ve done the work, and you will have your own back regardless of the outcome.”

There could be more fitting epitaph for Eddie Jones’ second coming as coach of his homeland. The knee-jerk jump to grab him after he left England, the hastily-assembled, undercooked coaching panel chosen to support him, the stream of false media narratives that accompanied his 10 months in charge, all spoke to the same lack of thoroughness in preparation, and an absence of respect for Process. Nobody did the real work that was required. For the time being at least, that has cost the Wallabies the respect of the entire rugby world outside Australia.