Australia slow starters but twice winners

SYDNEY - Australia always defeated New Zealand at league.

They would have beaten them at cricket if they had turned up. But at least New Zealand always won the rugby.

A century of comfortable assumptions was turned on its head in the 1980s.

After their grand slam-winning tour of the British Isles in 1984, inspired by the genius of Mark Ella, the Wallabies became a rugby force.

New Zealand cricketers, granted just one official test until the 1973-4 home and away series, became a competitive team in the same decade. Even the league side won the occasional match.

But it was rugby that featured the most fundamental shift between the two nations.

Up to the 1980s, New Zealand battled with South Africa for the then non-existent title of world champions. Australia's emergence as a world power coincided with the years of apartheid isolation for the Springboks. A new rivalry was born.

All Black halfback Justin Marshall, at 30 one of the veterans of the team, reflected on his childhood memories before tonight's semifinal.

Marshall said his father's generation had always revered the New Zealand-South Africa clashes. But for Marshall, as a youngster, Australia were always the great adversaries.

Rugby in New Zealand, a small frontier country, quickly became the national sport. It also held an instant appeal for the Afrikaners in South Africa.

But in Australia it has always been a sport concentrated in New South Wales and Queensland.

Victorian rules, later known as Australian rules, was the popular football code in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. Professional rugby league, which split the rugby code in England, had an identical effect in New South Wales.

Reflecting a similar social division, league became the sport of the working classes, union the diversion of the professionals.

The first New Zealand national side, not yet known as the All Blacks, toured Australia in 1884. Australia's first tour was to New Zealand in 1905.

The Wallabies, who learned their rugby under a hot sun and on hard grounds, threw the ball around from the outset and won a memorable home series against the All Blacks in 1929.

Thereafter, their successes were sporadic, although they were always competitive.

From 1931, the teams competed for the Bledisloe Cup, named after the then Governor-General of New Zealand, with New Zealand winning the first game at Eden Park 20-13.

In the 1960s Ken Catchpole and Phil Hawthorne formed the best halfback combination in the world and their rugged prop John Thornett led a side who beat South Africa, England and New Zealand in the same decade.

Australian rugby reached a nadir in the early 1970s, with a 16-11 defeat to Tonga in 1973. Stirred into action, the authorities recruited Carwyn James, the visionary Welshman behind the 1971 Lions who won a series in New Zealand for the first time.

Progress was swift and the 1984 Wallabies elevated their country into the world elite. Australia were justifiably favourites for the inaugural 1987 World Cup, before coming unstuck in a famous semifinal against France.

Four years later, with winger David Campese at his magical best, they won the tournament, beating England 12-6 at Twickenham. En route, they defeated the All Blacks 16-6 at Lansdowne Road and Campese scored a try with a scorching break at an acute angle and set up another.

Eight years later, there was another World Cup triumph, this time based on a defence copied from rugby league, which conceded only one try in the tournament.

Australia, once a peripheral force in world rugby union, are the only side to win the World Cup twice.

The real fear for their opponents would be if they persuaded the best of the league and the Australian rules players to join them in the union code. The rest of the world would not stand a chance.

- REUTERS

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