Rugby: Brumbies harness dressage skills for Super 12 final

By GREG ANSLEY


CANBERRA - Tomorrow night, unless the Canterbury Crusaders can halt the Brumbies' stampede, the balance of power in world rugby will shift a little more firmly across the Tasman.

The team from the Australian capital of Canberra have already pulled the Super 12 final out of New Zealand for the first time.

They are widely tipped to deliver another humiliation in that final, adding to Australia's Bledisloe and World Cup triumphs.

But the new giant in rugby, increasingly credited by commentators with changing the way the game is played, has not emerged from a union crucible, nor even a large centre with a deep population pool to draw from.

The home of the Brumbies is a city of just 348,500, marginally larger than Christchurch. It is an overwhelmingly middle-class town where rugby was, until the Brumbies, played enthusiastically, but not well.

While fans of the dominant Raiders league team festooned cars, homes and bodies with their side's vibrant green and yellow in passionate demonstrations of loyalty, rugby supporters were restrained.

Tomorrow at Bruce Stadium, the Brumbies will play before a capacity crowd of 25,000, most of them hugely and loudly partisan.

Among them will be Australian Capital Territory Chief Minister Kate Carnell, escaping the political storm of the state Budget brought down this week and the memories of the stadium's costly refurbishment that almost destroyed her Government.

A rugby fan since her youth in Queensland, Kate Carnell is a regular at Brumbies home games and was on a chartered flight to Auckland for the 1997 finals.

"Wild horses or Opposition parties couldn't keep me away," she says.

Nor have Canberra's notoriously crisp autumn nights, already producing frosts, deterred fans who scent blood.

Whipped up by a rising flood of chauvinism in the local media - ABC radio recites odes to the game - fans queued for tickets a fortnight before the Cats' semifinal, and grew even more fervent as the prospect of a final victory drew closer.

Local supporter Paddy Hanson had called ticket-seller Ticketek every 10 minutes for two hours before trying another two fruitless hours at the Brumbies club, and finally joining the queue.

Allan Black waited almost two hours for tickets: "It was worth it."

Only now, with the titans of three countries laid at the feet of the Brumbies and ultimate victory at hand, is the question being asked - how has this come to be?

"There's always been a strong core of participation rugby here," says Brumbies spokesman David Pembroke.

"There is a very good local competition and it is the sport that's played by a lot of the major high schools, in both the private and public school system.

"It's just that there was no way for people to express their support for a local side beyond the ACT team playing in ad hoc games against New South Wales, Queensland or touring teams that came here."

The breakthrough came with the Kookaburras, the ACT team that entered the NSW premiership six years ago with players such as George Gregan, Joe Roff and Rod Kafer and fought their way through to the final. That trio, now Brumbies stars, were among the nine ACT players in the Wallabies' victorious World Cup squad last year, trained by former Brumbies coach Rod Macqueen.

He moulded the Brumbies from the start, backed by the sponsorship of Canberra Milk, fighting its own battle against creeping deregulation of the dairy industry and the appearance of New South Wales milk in the region's supermarkets.

Peter Jenkins, rugby writer with the Australian national newspaper, credits Macqueen with establishing the keys to the rise and rise of the Brumbies, some of whom he took with him when he left to coach the Wallabies in 1997.

"A lot of the players were the offcuts from New South Wales and Queensland, thrown in with a core of ACT players. But the beauty of it was that when they got down there they moved into a compound of units," says Jenkins.

"The fact that they developed such teamwork and harmony early in the piece, living and breathing and eating football all the time, no doubt brought them closer together. That was the key element."

Canberra Times rugby writer Gary Scholes believes the Brumbies also benefited from early pre-season strategy sessions, a close, consistent squad and innovation.

Of the 29-man squad, 11 have been with the Brumbies since 1996, and a further nine since 1998.

"They've had basically the same squad in place for a long time, and the fruits have been shown this year," Scholes says.

"It doesn't matter whether you're in the 15, or the 22, or the 29, everyone's treated equally and they're all trained the same ...

"[Coach] Eddie Jones and [assistant coach] Ewen McKenzie really do their homework and even though it is often subtle, they have a different game plan for every team they play."

The strategy has hit paydirt this year. By the Cats semifinal, the Brumbies were top of the Super 12 ladder with 45 points - the best by an Australian team, six ahead of the Crusaders and just five behind Auckland's record 50 - conceding only 12 tries in 11 games.

Says Jenkins: "They've always played the game a little differently to everyone else. They've always played with a fair bit of flair."

Adds Kate Carnell: "They play the most attractive brand of football imaginable, throwing the ball around at amazing speed, innovative moves and going for a try rather than kicking penalties, making the game a much better spectator sport."

The business plan has helped.

Canberra Milk's sponsorship enabled the Brumbies to enlist the bulk of the team from New South Wales and Queensland, based around the Gregan-Roff-Kafer triad in a pattern that in this year's squad sees only four locals, 11 from NSW, 10 from Queensland, former Tongan flanker Ipolito Fenukitau, ex-Wellington back Des Tuiavii and former Argentinian international Patricio Noriega.

But the Brumbies outgrew Canberra Milk, last year signing up instead with the Australian arm of Computer Associates, the world's second-biggest software company, in a deal understood to be worth just under $A4 million ($5 million) over three years.

"It's through the global nature of rugby that we can tie in the value to a global sponsor, and therefore the money you can ask for is more substantial than you could from a Canberra sponsor," says Pembroke.

At home, the Brumbies have worked their support base hard, extending field trips to the hero-starved southern region of New South Wales that have been rewarded with a groundswell of goodwill recorded in e-mails and Web-page hits.

Giant players have regularly towered above Canberra's schoolchildren, who scoot home with Brumby posters for their bedrooms.

Although only four players are locals - plus Queenslanders Mark Bartholomeusz and David Giffin, who are business students at Canberra University - almost three-quarters of the team now live in Canberra.

Most are buying homes in a city where median house prices are about half those of Sydney, with a sophisticated lifestyle that blends more restaurants per head than any other Australian city with a network of cycle paths and nature walks and the country's fastest-growing information technology.

And there are no traffic jams.

When the Brumbies soared to the top in 1997, the outpouring of support was partly a reaction to the wholesale loss of 7000 Government jobs, a deep recession and the decline of the Raiders.

Not any more. Canberra is booming, with 60 per cent of its workforce in the private sector, unemployment at a 10-year low and a full percentage point lower than the national average, and the highest average weekly earnings in Australia.

Mark Jensen, of the Canberra Tourism and Events Corporation, plans to feature Gregan in a campaign to change perceptions about a city still regarded as a political sleep-inducer, and boost visitor numbers above the present two million a year.

"There's nothing better than a hometown win, especially when it has international implications," Jensen says.

Tomorrow night, about 20,000 roaring voices will echo the sentiment.