The Wallabies and Australian rugby were in rude health following victory in the 1999 World Cup final, but what goes up must come down and the first signs of a decline in their fortunes came with the Sydney Bledisloe Test in 2003. Under the lights at Homebush, where the World Cup final was due to be held just months later, the All Blacks handed out a solid, 51-20 thrashing – a worrying throwback to the pre-Rod Macqueen era. For the first time in five seasons, the Bledisloe was heading back across the Tasman.
Eddie Jones had taken over the reins following Macqueen’s retirement in 2001, and despite a reputation for tactical innovation – he had led the Brumbies to the Super 12 title in 2001, making them the first Australian team to win the tri-nation provincial competition in the professional era – found himself almost immediately under siege. At that point the Wallabies had won half of the World Cups to date, marking them as prime big tournament performers, and the Australian public’s expectations of their rugby team had been raised accordingly.
With performances in the run-up to the 2003 tournament lacklustre, Jones found his selections questioned almost daily. But he swatted the criticism aside with a refrain so persistent it became virtually the soundtrack to the 2003 winter. “I’m building a team for the World Cup,” Jones would reply, eyebrow raised, smiling with a mix of contempt and mischief. In ordinary circumstances the press would deem this a preposterously vague reply, but the miracles of the 90s had left a shamanistic mystique around the Wallabies coaching job. There was still, despite the criticism, an implicit trust in the Wallabies coach to work wonders beyond the realm of reason or form: “Eddie knows”.
The Wallabies stumbled through their early matches in the tournament, and for the first few minutes of their semi-final against New Zealand – the team that had belted them just months previously and breezed past the Springboks in the quarters – that looked unlikely to change. Then Stirling Mortlock, Australia’s best line-breaking centre since Tim Horan, intercepted a cutout pass from Carlos Spencer, the rich man’s Quade Cooper, and sprinted 80 metres to score under the posts. Suddenly, the game – and the Wallabies’ sense of purpose – shifted. Eddie had known all along: the team was peaking at the right time.
In previous World Cups, the All Blacks had shown themselves to be masters at pressing from the first minute but hopeless at coming back when put under pressure; the 2003 semi-final put further meat on the thesis, with Australia dominating from the moment they got in front. By the time George Gregan, with the clock winding down and Australian victory assured, pointed at his opposite number Byron Kelleher and taunted, “Four more years, boys, four more years,” the Wallabies could savour not just their own passage to the final, but a further entry in the expanding annals of Kiwi World Cup incompetence.
In the end, it didn’t matter so much that England, under the guidance of their unflappable fly-half Jonny Wilkinson, his fists pushed forward as if eternally waiting to set up some volleyball spike that never arrives, edged the final. Gregan had produced the sledge of the tournament, the Wallabies’ reputation as perennial World Cup finalists was assured, and the tournament was a runaway commercial and cultural success, providing a perfect advertisement for the game as it pursued its ambitious push for domestic winter code dominance. In retrospect, however, the celebrations that November night in 2003 heralded not a shining new era of progress for Australian rugby, but the beginning of a downturn from which, in truth, the game has never really rebounded.
As the euphoria of a successful home World Cup evaporated, the Wallabies’ form deteriorated. What followed was a pattern that has become depressingly familiar to observers of the team over the past decade, with the team yoyo-ing between thumping losses and semi-convincing wins. Jones spent two seasons following the 2003 tournament trying to remedy these alarming and seemingly inexplicable fluctuations in form, but with no success; as George Gregan’s form followed that of the team, a national debate that threatened to kill anyone with an IQ over 50 emerged over the number of steps a halfback should take from the breakdown before passing the ball.
This was also the dawn of a now-robust era of what are euphemistically termed “off-field incidents”, when Wallabies players’ regular experiments in public urination, ice-throwing, and assault of fans and taxi drivers came to dominate the media’s coverage of the sport. Times had changed: where once Wallabies players had been free to drunkenly pass out in public or enjoy an orgy in peace, now every indiscretion was suddenly a story. Professionalism went both ways: it demanded higher standards of on-tour conduct of the players, but it also gave them more money to indulge their juvenile danger-lust.
By 2005, Jones’s time was up, the coup de grace to a once-dignified coaching career delivered by revelations of an internal Wallabies camp questionnaire in which the players named prop Matt Dunning as the team member they would most like to eat. Where other teams, two years out from the 2007 World Cup, were focused on how to win the Webb Ellis trophy, the Wallabies had zeroed in on something far more important: best practice for the consumption of human flesh. The image was apt: Australian rugby had begun to eat itself.
Meanwhile, the rival domestic football codes were getting their act together. Traditional, working class club Wests Tigers won the NRL premiership in 2005, prompting jubilant calls of rugby league’s return to its own heartland: league, the pundits cried, was back. The Sydney Swans put decades of heartbreak aside to claim their first flag (as Sydney) the same year, opening the eyes of Australia’s biggest city to a sport with which it had previously enjoyed only the most lukewarm embrace. And most tellingly of all, John O’Neill left the ARU in 2003 to take over the reins of Football Federation Australia; the Socceroos had not only whisked away rugby’s prize administrator, they also, with their historic qualification for the 2006 World Cup, threatened to usurp the Wallabies as Australia’s favourite winter sport team.
The ARU’s answer to these sudden, multiple challenges was, puzzlingly, to return to the past. Gary Flowers took over from O’Neill at the helm of the ARU, admitting on his first day that he had not even been first choice for the job – precisely the type of small-man-syndrome statement calculated to instil zero confidence in the future of the sport. After the inconsistency and fraying discipline of the late Jones years, the Wallabies desperately needed a modern, dynamic coach who could remedy the team’s historic deficiency – its cotton-wool forward pack – and motivate a disparate group of players prone to off-field distraction. Instead, Flowers gave them John Connolly.
Connolly had been overlooked for the Wallabies job in 1996, but if he was the right choice then, he certainly wasn’t the right choice a decade later. Much of the man’s fire for the sport appeared to have evaporated by 2006, and while a genial presence, he wandered through training sessions and media appearances with the bemused, hands-behind-the-back remove of a tweed coat-wearing retiree out for a Sunday stroll.
Connolly’s tenure, in every respect, was a step back: to a kicking game out of line with the Wallabies rich tradition of attacking, ball-in-hand rugby, and to a time when Australia arrived at the big matches as chronic underdogs. Failure at the 2007 World Cup would constitute a new low for Australian rugby in the professional era. The England team of 2007 was as much a step down from its 2003 vintage as the Australian outfit; but in an embarrassingly one-sided quarter-final, the English pack demolished the Wallabies’ featherweight forwards.
The Wallabies had survived for decades with a system of priorities that put defence and forward resilience a distant second to ingenuity in the backline combinations; finally, the approach had caught up with them. The repeated collapse of the Australian scrum raised urgent questions for the ARU. Our fat guys were just as fat as any other country’s fat guys – so why had we consistently, decade after decade, failed to see a decent on-field return out of them?
Two men were brought in to solve this riddle and to set Australian rugby, its finances in disarray amid poor Super 14 attendances and waning public enthusiasm for the code, right again. O’Neill galloped back to the rescue of the ARU following the conclusion of his successful football interregnum, and he immediately junked Connolly in favour of a man he felt had the authority and nous to return the Wallabies to past glories. Robbie Deans had built a stellar record as coach of the Canterbury Crusaders, the most successful provincial side in the recent history of the sport, but his appointment was not without controversy. For all its success as a professional sport, no matter the ease of its self-smoothing as a sleek and malleable corporate brand, rugby in Australia remained trenchantly parochial: could a New Zealander really be trusted to lead the Wallabies?
Deans was big on what the media likes to term “culture”, which meant he spent a lot of time trying to get the Wallabies not to behave like children when removed from his view. In this he failed spectacularly, but his quest was both aided and undermined by the expansion of the Super Rugby competition and the launch of two new provincial teams in Australia: aided, because it allowed for the talent of players such as Quade Cooper, Digby Ioane and Will Genia to shine more brightly, more quickly, than might have been the case in the old Super 14; undermined, because the sudden elevation of these players to the Wallabies run-on side gave an immature skew to an already flighty squad.
Cooper led the Queensland Reds to their inaugural Super title in 2011 with the kind of jagging, improvisational, risk-taking freedom Australian rugby had not witnessed since the days of David Campese. As the team headed to the 2011 World Cup, there were genuine hopes that Australian rugby had unearthed a core of young players to take the Wallabies back to the top of the global tree. Instead, Cooper wilted in the semi-final against the All Blacks: he kicked the ball out on the full from the kick-off, and things only got worse from there. New Zealand didn’t just win the World Cup in 2011; they also put the horrors of 1991 and 1999 and 2003 behind them, burying the choker tag once and for all. More than a simple sporting triumph, their home World Cup was a kind of cultural excoriation.
If the Wallabies’ golden years were bookended by upset semi-final wins over the All Blacks, defeat in 2011 said everything about Australia’s seemingly secular slide down the global pecking order. Deans stuck around for two more seasons, lost the Lions series, then decamped to Japan; in “Red, Black and Gold”, the book he released last year, he argued that the Wallabies would never be able to compete with the All Blacks, because New Zealand boasts both better development pathways and a stronger sense of leadership and responsibility among its senior players. Australian culture, he essentially claimed, would never allow the Wallabies to be real contenders again.
Developments in the two years following Deans’s departure have done nothing to refute this depressing thesis. Ewen McKenzie came and went amid a blizzard of Kurtley Beale text messages; the toxic culture and the win-loss, win-loss, loss-loss monotony of the post-Macqueen playing record stayed the same. Now Michael Cheika, the straight-talking architect of the NSW Waratahs’ 2014 Super Rugby title win, has taken over, and the pattern appears little changed: victory over the All Blacks one week has been followed, inevitably, by crushing defeat to them the next.
Since the 2003 World Cup, the Wallabies have played New Zealand 35 times. They have won seven of those matches. It has been 12 years since Australia held the Bledisloe Cup, the most reliable historical barometer of our progress in the sport. Much of the media’s coverage of the team is now a simple chronicle of personality conflicts: Robbie Deans doesn’t get on with Matt Giteau, who doesn’t get on with Quade Cooper, who doesn’t like Kurtley Beale, who doesn’t like Di Patston, who has an ally in Ewen McKenzie, who isn’t sure what to think about Bernard Foley, who doesn’t care much for Adam Ashley-Cooper (who knows if any of this is true; and who cares).
The Wallabies over the last decade have built, in effect, a resounding multi-squad rebuttal to Tolstoy’s old quip about families: all unhappy Wallabies sides are unhappy in the same way, lost amid a seemingly intractable tangle of on-field inconsistency, off-field idiocy, ego-driven preening and simple lack of passion. They travel to England more in hope than expectation.
But there is, at the very least, greater depth in the Australian playing ranks today than at any other point in recent history – notwithstanding the slightly desperate-seeming last-minute admission of overseas-based players into the Wallabies squad. The tight five is improving, meaning a repeat of the rout of 2007 appears unlikely. Israel Folau is perhaps the most exciting outside back in world rugby today. And if the history of the Wallabies at the World Cup teaches us one thing, it’s that Australian rugby is at its best under pressure, when the momentum of events and talent and fashion appears to be drifting, drifting inexorably away.
That was the story in the final minutes of the quarter-final against Ireland 24 years ago; it was the story, again, in the choral glories that followed the meanderings of the mid-1990s. The great survivors of Australian sport might surprise us yet.
