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Wayne Smith | August 06, 2007
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-32102,00.html
IF there is one thing that John O'Neill's compelling autobiography It's Only a Game has highlighted, it is how awash Australian rugby is with dark political agendas. Look hard enough and usually it's possible to discern what motivates them.
But whatever the motivation is behind The Sydney Morning Herald's attacks over the past week on the Wallabies coaching staff, the Australian Rugby Union's financial position, the Australian Rugby Championship and the game in general, it defies explanation. The onslaught has been as baffling as it has been belligerent.
Seemingly on the basis of little more than John Muggleton's walk-out at the John Eales Medal dinner after ARU president Paul McLean forgot to mention him as one of the Wallabies' three assistant coaches, the SMH has portrayed the coaching staff as deeply divided, fatally flawed. In one broad sweep, the Sydney broadsheet has declared Australia's World Cup chances to be in jeopardy.
Sorry, but that's utter nonsense. If there's any one thing that's jeopardising the Wallabies' prospects in France next month, it's the brilliance of the All Blacks, not whether Muggleton or any other coach is feeling miffed.
The truth is Muggleton had cause to be riled. He is too often forgotten whenever the Wallabies' coaches are mentioned. The explanation is that he has the team's defence working so well most of the time that only rarely does he edge into the media spotlight. "If it ain't broke don't write about it" tends to be the motto of most sports journalists.
So usually it's restarts coach Michael Foley in the hot seat, attempting to explain where the Australian scrum is going wrong, or attack coach Scott Johnson, outlining where the Wallabies backs are falling short in their execution.
It is unrealistic to expect 40 grown men to be thrown in together in a Wallabies camp and for the whole thing to run friction-free. It's an ultra-competitive environment and not all of the competitive energy is directed outwards, be it against New Zealand, South Africa or Namibia. There is also a lot of internal rivalry bubbling just beneath the surface, even in the most harmonious of squads.
Inevitably there were teething problems with the coaching staff last year. As captain Stirling Mortlock put it on the weekend, not only were the coaches unfamiliar with the players and vice-versa -- hardly surprisingly since all but Muggleton were brought into the Wallabies from overseas coaching assignments -- but the coaches were largely unfamiliar with each other.
Differences in philosophy were inevitable and there is no denying they caused tension. Last year's Sydney Test against the Springboks was every bit as diabolical as the SMH has suggested and it already has been well-reported that at half-time Connolly's assistants pleaded with him to change his tactics. He refused.
Basically both Connolly and his Boks counterpart Jake White went into the Test with the same plan of not running the ball out of their own red zone, each one banking on the other to blink first, at which point they then hoped to win off the other team's mistakes.
The trouble was, neither blinked and the match, as a consequence, degenerated into a kick-athon of the worst kind. Significantly, the Wallabies adhered to the game plan, as boring and counter-intuitive as it was, and won.
Contrast that to the Paris Test against France in 2004 when they tossed out Eddie Jones' equally rigid tactics, played the way they wanted -- and lost.
If nothing else, the infamous 2006 Boks Test showed that the team leaders respected Connolly enough to play the game his way. And significantly too, Connolly subsequently mended his ways. Only once since then have the Wallabies resorted to grinding tactics to eke out a win, in the Italy Test last November when they dug a hole for themselves early and had to claw their way out.
On the flip side, the assistant coaches more than once have saved Connolly from himself.
Case in point, the Scotland Test at Murrayfield a fortnight later when Connolly screamed to his coaches to yank Stephen Moore from the game after the young hooker missed three early lineout throws. Thankfully, Foley ignored the directive, calmed Connolly down, and Moore weathered the crisis.
Had Connolly had his way, Moore would have been finished as a Test player. Thanks to Foley and scrum coach Alec Evans, he is now well on his way to becoming a real force for the Wallabies.
It's an easy thing to paint such shouting matches in the coaches' box as evidence of an internal rift.
But in some teams, Connolly's Wallabies being one of them, that's just part of the normal cut and thrust. Connolly didn't want yes men on his staff -- and that was always going to lead to "full and frank discussions", as the diplomats like to phrase it.
But it is just wildly and wackily untrue to portray his coaching staff as "a viper's nest of bickering egos", as the SMH has done.
Nor have the players been distressed by these creative tensions. "While we're not as polished as we'd like to be, we are happy with the direction we're now taking," Mortlock told The Australian.
"We're not in unfamiliar territory where media criticism is concerned, except this time it's not warranted ... we feel we are putting together decent performances and we couldn't be more happy with the coaches at the moment."
No doubt the SMH will portray these comments as predictable spin. No doubt, too, I will be cast as a Connolly lackey, papering over the yawning cracks in his team.
That's a risk I'll have to take. This is tricky ground journalistically, but the fact is the sky isn't falling. I realise that's not much of a story. But there it is. There is no expose because there is nothing to expose, certainly nothing remotely on the scale the SMH is insinuating.
Its attack has been a grab-bag of minor problems and complaints all lumped together. What the newspaper has done is sweep up all the dirt that has built up in the corners of the game, piled it together in a little heap and then stood back and exclaimed: "What a mess!"
The ARC hasn't even started and the SMH is savaging it. The idea of a third-tier national competition has been around for a long while, at least since 1996 when management consultant Michael Crawford prepared a strategic plan for the ARU.
"It was viewed as one way of increasing rugby's playing population and audience," noted O'Neill in his autobiography, before going on to say that he viewed it at the time as "financially risky".
So there is nothing new in the SMH's announcement that the competition could cause the ARU grief on its balance sheet. Everyone has known that, none more acutely than former ARU chief executive Gary Flowers who, notwithstanding, still pushed the concept through.
It may be that Flowers has ignored the bottom line to his own detriment and that of the ARU, but he also recognised that ultimately the waffling had to stop. If Australian rugby was going to expand its professional playing base, it needed to make a strategic investment in an ARC or something like it.
Like the Pura Cup, which has long been a drain on Cricket Australia's
resources, there is a price to pay in staging the ARC but the potential returns make it a risk Australian rugby decided was worth taking.
The attendant dangers have been well flagged. The ARU's task now is to put snarling watchdogs in place to ensure costs don't spiral out of control, allow the competition to run its course this year, judge its merits and then decide what is to be done with it.
It may well be that the decision made is to abandon the whole exercise as simply too expensive, but what merit is there in a media outlet attempting to sabotage it now to create a self-fulfilling prophesy?
As for the SMH's revelation that O'Neill and Connolly are not close, whoever said they needed to be? Barring some remarkable circumstances, like O'Neill sacking Connolly in the next fortnight or the Wallabies winning the World Cup in October, the new ARU chief and the Wallabies coach will part company before the year is out.
In between, they will have their inevitable blow-ups. Connolly is a renowned straight-shooter and more, if his nickname is to be taken seriously, while O'Neill can fight bare knuckle, too, if the occasion demands, as his autobiography frequently illustrates.
Yet there was nothing untoward, as the SMH hints, in the fact that Connolly didn't want to be interviewed about O'Neill's return to the ARU when approached for comment two days before the Fiji Test in Perth. As Connolly explained at the time, he wanted to promote the Test not talk about the ARU's internal machinations. It was a lame excuse and he knew it.
His real reason was that he felt a strong sense of loyalty to Flowers and didn't want to be seen to be denigrating his old boss by effusively welcoming the new one. So he tried to say nothing. Only when the SMH correspondent and I both suggested that for appearance sake he needed to say something did Connolly give us a diplomatic and gracious statement.
If there was something sinister in any of this, why, one wonders, was it not reported at the time? Why is it coming out now and in this tattle-tale fashion?
Rugby attracts strong personalities. That's what makes it so colourful and endlessly fascinating. And there will be times when the collision of unyielding personalities results in a track wreck. This isn't one of them.
There is no story here, or at least not the one the SMH has been splashing all over its pages. What is going on at the Wallabies now, both on the surface and beneath it, is happening in every other ambitious professional footballing operation in this country, be it in rugby, AFL, NRL or soccer.
The Wallabies are going to do it tough in France.
There's trouble aplenty heading their way ... Wales, Springboks, All Blacks, France. But at least all those fights will be out in the open. And against real men. Not straw men.
Finally....a balanced article......
Ladies and Gentlemen......our new CHIEF RUGBY CORRESPONDENT!!!!
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