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Connolly's systems must deliver
By Wayne Smith
September 22, 2007
LONG gone are the days when John Connolly would hurriedly sketch out his plans for training on a sheet of paper propped up against the steering wheel while driving to Ballymore, dodging - or more likely causing - four or five accidents along the way.
If that sounds like amateur hour, it was. The game was still six years away from going professional when Connolly inherited the Queensland Reds from Bob Templeton in 1989, and a man had to make a living in the real world.
In his case, it was in the transport business and Connolly's forte was organising deliveries to arrive on schedule, fuss-free. His work was organised. The rugby took its chances.
Now rugby is his work and the package awaiting delivery is The Webb Ellis Cup. Not for him the eight years French coach Bernard Laporte has had to prepare for this tricky shipment. Connolly was given just 20 months, and that's a perilously short lead time given that the starting point was the lowest ebb Australian rugby had reached for 40 years.
Australia, world champions in 1999, the narrowest of runners-up in 2003, had slid to fourth on the world rankings. And the day Connolly started work, they sank to fifth, just for good measure. It's tempting to suggest there was only one way they could go under their new coach, but that wasn't necessarily true.
England, for example, went into freefall after 2003 and still hasn't pulled out of it, the world champions ranking seventh on the IRB table, and looking lucky to be there.
It's still a long shot that Australia will win a third world title, but not as long as it was a week ago.
Looking back, Wales doesn't look too daunting a mountain to have conquered, but that's the perspective of a climber who has attained the summit and regained his breath. At the time he was scaling the cliff-face, it didn't look quite so easy. And still there are even trickier peaks in the Wallabies' path, England, the All Blacks and quite possibly the Springboks.
Each one of those matches is a treacherous slippery slope and it could be that even if they play well, the Wallabies could abruptly exit at any moment. But while in one sense the trickiest work of Connolly's coaching career still lies ahead of him over the coming weeks, in another the hard part has been done.
Connolly's delivery systems are in place. Whether they deliver remains to be seen, but they sure weren't sketched on a sheet of paper propped up against the steering wheel.
In the space of less than two years, he and Michael Foley have rebuilt the discredited scrum and resurrected the careers of such players as Matt Dunning, Stephen Moore and Rocky Elsom. With Scott Johnson's vital input, Connolly has the Wallabies playing a brand of attacking rugby that is not only non-excruciating, but, at times, actually exhilarating to watch.
And in unison with John Muggleton, he has actually improved what already was the best defensive system in world rugby, incorporating into it selected elements of the rush defence that has made the Boks so menacing.
But, most of all, Connolly has done what all good coaches do. He has made himself redundant, at least as far as the detail is concerned.
The overview he still does better than anyone else on his staff, but, by design, he has built a coaching structure that can function efficiently even if he is not around. Which is handy because, after his announcement in his newspaper column last weekend that he definitely has decided not to re-apply to coach the Wallabies after the World Cup, he has at best only a month to go.
Forwards coach Foley has decided he is not willing and/or ready to step up to the Wallabies' head coaching position and his self-assessment should warrant respect, but he will not be doing himself or the game justice if he merely carves out a comfortable niche for himself as a permanent No2.
That leaves Johnson and Muggleton as the only in-house candidates. And, increasingly, the indications are that this is a position that should be filled from within.
There is no question that Robbie Deans has built a reputation with the Crusaders that is unequalled in provincial rugby anywhere in the world, but is it going to be possible to transplant a Christchurch culture successfully into the Wallabies, particularly if the ARU refuses to give him carte blanche to recruit his own coaching lieutenants?
As it stands, the Johnson-Muggleton-Foley triumvirate is fully functional, even if in Connolly's ideal world he also would have had a full-time kicking coach on staff and a national forwards unit in operation, feeding quality, uniformly trained players into the Australian pack.
But if importing Deans entails dismantling a system that is working well, then that might be a price too high for the Wallabies to pay.
Johnson appears to be emerging as favourite to succeed Connolly and not too much should be read into his public displays of reluctance. He keeps asking the ARU to outline what the job entails when clearly what they want to hear is him telling them how he sees it working.
One thing the ARU must avoid, however, is creating an either-or scenario, so that whoever misses out on the job, Johnson or Muggleton, feels compelled to quit the Wallabies.
Connolly might have made himself dispensable. So far they have not. Even if Australia wins the World Cup, it hasn't finished the job. In fact, it has barely started.
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