The Rugby Championship 2022, Week 3

Australia v SA

This week started with Australia hosting South Africa in Adelaide, a city that rarely sees rugby, let alone test rugby. RA couldn’t find anyone to promote the game and go to Adelaide, while several current and recent players (who are free agents of course) went to Melbourne to promote an NBA game that was being played there. And then people wonder why their TV deal is worth about 1/3 of the NZRU’s TV deal…

Although you might expect this to be a walkover for the Boks, their recent record in Australia is dismal, they haven’t won there for nearly a decade.

This match was no change to recent form, despite the bookies and the experts predictions. In fact, until late in the game the Wallabies held the Boks to only three points, their try in the couple of minutes made the scoreline look close and that is not really a good indicator of how one-sided the game was. It is an indicator that the Wallabies subs were a long way off the pace, which we saw in their last match too, an area of concern going forward amid the joy in Australia. The Boks’ defence remained pretty resolute - it just faced too much attack to hold up against every one - but the features we’d expect to see like big tackles, turnovers and so on were all there. Their set piece remained pretty dominant too - Australia only won three of their own lineouts for example, and gave up a load of penalties at scrum time. Their weakness was, yet again, that the high ball bombardment was pretty solidly defused and, at one point when Australia were down to 14 they were already camped in the Wallabies 22 and didn’t seem to know how to generate a try-scoring attack from there. There was some resolute defence too, the tackle by Koroibete on Mapimi is one we’ll see on highlights packages for a long time to come, and rightly so. If you play with a limited attack plan you need it to not be defended solidly or you tend to get nowhere… and that’s what we saw here. The Australian attack seemed to exploit a systematic flaw in the Boks’ defence as well. I’m not saying that they didn’t play well - getting into a position to exploit that weaknesses is hard work but it will be interesting to see if the Boks have plugged that gap next week.

NZ v Argentina

The second match had NZ hosting Argentina in Christchurch, a return after several years, since the earthquake. However, CHCH is a far more regular test venue than Adelaide and you would imagine, going forward, it will see tests most years once again. It is also the home of the Crusaders who have won 6/7 titles since Razor took over as head coach, they only missed out on the seventh because, although they won all the games in the SRTT competition they placed third on points difference so didn’t make the final.

While it might seem odd when everyone was won-1, lost-1, these were really the two form teams of the Championship with convincing wins in the previous round, both of them probably against expectations. Where the earlier match was a story of holes in defences, this was a story of no holes, or hardly any. The ABs scored a try from close range, mauling the ball over from a 5m lineout and worked another through one of the rare holes to Clarke, Los Pumas returned the favour with one of their own. But both sides completed more than 90% of their tackles, almost unheard of, the Pumas over 96% of theirs. Some people are saying this reflects poor attacking strategies from both sides; I’m not sure: both sides mounted ferocious, and fast, defences that tirelessly hounded and pressed the attacks. You would think that a great side would find ways to exploit that - if Beauden Barrett was fit some kicks over the line to regather maybe but whether those kicks weren’t on or Mo’unga couldn’t find them in the play book I’m not sure - I am sure that they weren’t used and so we had massive defensive tussles. Argentina won, courtesy of an insane number of penalties that they took, mostly from long distance. You can argue this is also a limited game plan, but if you have a kicker who is kicking 7/7, from anywhere in their half, and a defence that is making over 96% of their tackles, it’s going to win pretty often. In this case it saw Los Pumas to their second win against the AB and their first win in NZ. If they can back it up, they might just win TRC, stranger things have happened. Despite last week’s announcement of support for Foster, a second loss to Argentina might well cost him his job.

Next week

Next week we have a repeat of these matches. I like these “mini-series” we’re getting this year. Too bad we won’t see it again next year, because RWC will distort the timetable, but it seems like a better format than the home and away against each team. Travel between NZ and Australia is negligible, but for the other countries it’s huge. This gives the teams a chance to plan and plot after last week without the impact of a day lost to travel and a day lost to adjusting to time zones.