Dejected Wallabies captain Michael Hooper after being defeated by the All Blacks in 2018. Photo / Photosport
COMMENT:
Australian rugby looks to be broken at the moment. Their Super Rugby teams can't really play and they certainly can't win.
Not many across the Tasman can muster enough interest to grab the remote and turn the footy on and hardly anyone can find the motivation to actually leave the house and do something so rash as pay money to turn up at the stadium.
Meanwhile Rugby Australia chief executive Raelene Castle is either on the verge of the greatest broadcast heist in history or on the verge of unemployment if her gamble to reject the incumbent rights holder backfires.
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It's all doom and gloom. It all seems hopeless, broken beyond repair and Australia, two times world champion in the 1990s, are supposedly going to soon be dropping further down the rankings, waving at the likes of Georgia and Japan as they pass, heading in the opposite direction.
But come August, when the All Blacks are in Melbourne for the first Bledisloe Cup test of 2020, there's little chance that Australian rugby will look broken.
The All Blacks, when they are knee deep in pressure, exerted by a well-coached and well-drilled Wallabies team, won't be thinking so much about the fact that Australia's Super Rugby sides hadn't beaten a Kiwi team three weeks into the competition.
Whether Castle is in or out of a job won't change the fact that in six months, the Wallabies will be looking every inch like a serious threat with the potential to win back the Bledisloe Cup.
What's happening now in Super Rugby doesn't dictate what will be happening in the Rugby Championship.
While Rugby Australia has problems stretching across its vast land mass, none, this year at least, are likely to hinder new Wallabies coach Dave Rennie from doing what he has been brought in to do – which is to create a test team that better reflects, through performance and results, the obvious talent at his disposal.
Australia's Super Rugby teams are a disaster zone. There's not enough quality or collective experience to make any of the respective sides serious contenders.
The coaching teams in charge are mostly out of their depth and while New Zealand might despair that the Mitre 10 Cup has dropped in intensity this last decade, it still provides a vastly superior apprenticeship to what's available in Australia.
New Zealand has a wider base of talent, a better development system and more rugby intelligence plugged into the network and as such, has dominated Super Rugby since day one.
But what happens in Super Rugby is not an evidential basis to form a view on what to expect in the Rugby Championship.
Medics, who know better than anyone the need to create a definite link between cause and effect, would say the evidence is strong enough to conclude that there is an association between the two – that it is often true that a nation that has success in one has success in the other.
In 2009 the Bulls won Super Rugby and the majority of that squad played for the Springboks, who won the Tri-Nations, while in 2001 the Brumbies' Super Rugby title flowed into a successful Wallabies campaign later in the year.
Again, in 2011, the Reds won Super Rugby and many in that team helped the Wallabies win the last Tri-Nations.
And in the last decade that has been particularly true. Since 2010 New Zealand sides have won Super Rugby seven times and in the same period, the All Blacks have won the Rugby Championship seven times.
The medics, however, would not say there is a link between Super Rugby success and Rugby Championship success. That is, they wouldn't believe that one always causes the other as there is a relatively strong body of contrary evidence to show this isn't the case.
The Crusaders beat the Blues in 1998 to win Super Rugby and yet the All Blacks went on to lose five tests in a row and finish last in the Tri-Nations.
In 2000 the Crusaders were champions, but the Wallabies won the Tri-Nations and in 2004 the Brumbies won their second title, but the Boks swept to the title later in the year.
The Highlanders beat the Hurricanes in the 2015 final but it was the Wallabies who won the Rugby Championship.
So we have an association and not a link, therefore the smarter conclusion to reach is that the Wallabies have battled in the last decade for reasons that include but are not confined to the lack of success they have enjoyed in Super Rugby.
Other forces have been at work, most notably a lack of understanding about how they want to play, inconsistent selection, tension in the wider coaching teams and a general weakness in their leadership and decision-making.
Not everyone in New Zealand has loved that the All Blacks have opted for continuity of coaching personnel, but across the Tasman there is universal regret that the Wallabies didn't nurture, develop and then promote coaches from within the national team to deliver a more stable environment.
In the same period New Zealand went through two coaches, the Wallabies had five and amid all the changing they lost sight of who they were and what type of characteristics defined them.
Their rugby was confused, eclectic and inconsistent. Collectively they had poor standards off the field – no strong figures holding everyone to account.
They saw star players have their contracts terminated for misconduct. In 2013 half their team drank themselves silly in central Dublin and didn't bother to hide it.
They saw a coach, Ewen McKenzie, resign because of an internal scandal at the heart of which was poor professional ethics and then at the World Cup last year there was a public bust-up between Michael Cheika and Castle.
Israel Folau became unmanageable which may have been no one's fault but his, yet it's hard not to wonder if he would have tweeted what he did had there been a more defined sense of what the Wallabies' value systems were and what precisely was expected of individuals to uphold them.
The problems the Wallabies have are mostly inherent within the Wallabies rather than endemic to Super Rugby.
The lack of strong leaders is a problem which is not being fixed by Super Rugby but isn't being caused there so when everyone stops to properly survey the current landscape, they should be able to see that Super Rugby carnage is not an impediment to Rennie building a highly competitive Wallabies team later this year.
Rennie loves the proverbial hospital pass. He took on a Chiefs side in 2012 that everyone thought was a basket case and six months later were champions.
He relished that in both years they won the title, the Chiefs met the Crusaders in the semifinal and that the media backed the latter to win.
It bugged him on one level that his side couldn't win the same media respect, but he took the theme of "they don't rate us, we don't care" into the changing room and fuelled the players with it.
He's a coach who knows how to get under the bonnet of players and rev their engines and he's a coach whose best results have come when his team has been widely expected to fail.
His other great quality is selection and he'll find 23 players good enough for test football amid the Super Rugby rubble and when the first Bledisloe hangs in the balance come the final quarter, there won't be anyone owning up to what they were thinking might happen six months earlier.
Fabien Galthie has picked a second-choice squad for July's NZ Tests.