Wallabies coach Michael Cheika says he has a plan for the World Cup. He even smiles when he says it. However, following his team’s 47-10 win against the USA Eagles on the weekend, the question is whether his players have taken ownership of Cheika’s plan. And if so, do the players collectively have the All Blacks-like self-sufficiency to get out of trouble on the pitch by themselves?
In a game of contrasting halves for the Wallabies, the foremost impression gleaned from the exhibition friendly – one, it should be noted, featuring a second-string Australian XV coming off a gruelling fitness-based training block at Notre Dame University – is that the Wallabies remain a team too reliant on their coach. Up 14-0 in as many minutes, the Wallabies limped into the sheds leading just 14-10 at the break. A few choice Chieka words later and the Wallabies rattled off five tries in a 33-0 second-half turnaround.
Would the team have sorted itself out without Cheika? Maybe if key leaders Stephen Moore, David Pocock, Adam Ashley-Cooper and Michael Hooper played. None of them were in the match-day 23. Wallabies captain Moore, for one, has a good nose for the subtle momentum shifts in a game and would have recalibrated the team early in the piece. Pocock offers the same as a leader even though he isn’t officially designated as one of Moore’s vice-captains.
Cheika wouldn’t have seriously viewed the USA match as a player form guide; he’d run his players ragged in training without a tapering off period. Many would be bruised, battered and sluggish well into the end of this week. No reasonable coach would expect meaningful individual performances following a heavy fitness-based training load. Rather, it would have been the mental intangibles Cheika sought. Things like on-field problem-solving, decision-making and leadership. Only Matt Giteau ticked all three boxes in the first-half.
In many ways, the exhibition against the Eagles, the weakest opposition the Wallabies have played this season, has been the most instructive of all the team’s matches played this season, and that includes wins against the All Blacks and Springboks. It would have dawned on Chieka that for all his remarkable efforts in a severely compromised World Cup planning cycle, the one crucial winning ingredient he needs – team self-sufficiency – can’t be acquired cheaply. It takes time, years even. And it’s time the Wallabies don’t have.
It’s a winning advantage the All Blacks acquired the hard way in the wake of their shock 2007 World Cup quarter-final exit against France. That loss revealed NZ’s Achilles heel at the time – an alarming lack of leadership when the team is under pressure. The solution: build a self-sufficient team with key leadership pillars spread throughout the side, a team experienced and confident enough to assess any situation under immense stress and react accordingly. It took the best part of four years to achieve the goal, culminating in the 2011 World Cup final win against France. The All Blacks had no right to win that game. That they did was only because of team self-sufficiency. The coaching staff were powerless and could only look on like the rest of us during those final hair-raising minutes.
England’s coach Stuart Lancaster started his World Cup quest by backward planning. Borrowing heavily from legendary San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh’s teaching in his book The Score Takes Care of Itself, Lancaster determined it was team culture and collective values that would determine 2015 success more so than raw talent. Lancaster wanted his players to “become champions before they became champions”, the theory being that a baseline of high individual standards would eventually flow through to team performance.
It has taken time for England to work towards this high ideal, just as it had with the All Blacks. But, interestingly, Lancaster has shrewdly extended his backward planning goal beyond the 2015 tournament to include the 2019 World Cup in Japan. His thinking is sound: he has a young side, the least experienced of the top tier teams, and win or lose at the 2015 tournament, he doesn’t want them to fall off the metaphorical cliff at the end of the tournament. The journey to self-sufficiency will continue for England as per Lancaster’s big plan.
This is the calibre of thinking and planning the Wallabies are up against. It’s a sobering reality check for a nation sold on the idea changing coaches can be a fast track to World Cup success. It takes years to build championship teams. Cheika’s record with Leinster and the NSW Waratahs suggests he can do it quicker than most. However, the odds are too heavily stacked against him this time. One hopes the Australian Rugby Union adopts a longer view like Lancaster has and give consideration to how the Wallabies can use the 2015 tournament, win or lose, as part of longer journey to Japan in 2019. It’s the details in between World Cups that make a difference and on that front Cheika has had a year with his side whereas his peers have, in almost all cases, a full four-year cycle. Cheika needs more time to build a team that doesn’t need him in the heat of battle.
For now, the Wallabies look lost without him.
