Enough is enough. How much longer must we endure the disastrous quagmire in which Australian rugby finds itself after the weekend’s humiliating loss, a loss which – although I haven’t looked this up – I am pretty sure is the biggest defeat in Wallaby history?
Even worse, it was to South Africa, a nation which if I recall correctly only began playing rugby in the early 1990s.
The facts are clear: the Joe Schmidt experiment has failed and it is time to move on. If last year taught us anything, it was that keeping a coach around after he has lost a game is a recipe for disaster. Eddie Jones lost a game, and like idiots Rugby Australia continued his employment. How did that work out for you, guys? Exactly.
Schmidt has been given a generous span of four games to prove his worth, and has failed miserably. The humiliating loss to South Africa followed even more humiliating victories over Wales and Georgia in Test matches which proved beyond all shadow of doubt that this is the worst-coached Wallaby team since the last one.
The thing that galls one the most is that we know that Australia’s rightful ranking in the world is number one. I distinctly recall Australia being the best team in the world, in fact, at one point.
We won two World Cups, for god’s sake, and yet now we can’t even beat South Africa? It’s a horrific slide, and the only difference between then and now that I can discern is that when Australia won the World Cup, Joe Schmidt was not the coach, and now, he is. Do the math, people. It’s not brain surgery.
(Photo by Morgan Hancock/Getty Images)
The match against the Springboks demonstrated so many areas of weakness in the Wallaby team that it’s hard to know where to start. The scrum was weak, the lineout was a shambles, the kicking game was awful. No cohesion in the backline, at the lineout, or in casual conversation on the bench. Defence was flimsy, attack was directionless, and frankly the players were a lot less physically attractive than they should have been.
So how do we turn it around? It’s easy to blame the coach for everything, which is why that is what I am doing – the last thing we need at this stage is to make things more difficult than they have to be. In the end, the buck stops with the coach, and if he can’t turn this team around, it’s time to find someone who can.
There are simply no excuses for taking a playing group as rich in talent as Australia’s – remember, two World Cups, plus the 1984 Grand Slam, plus a 73-3 victory over Western Samoa in 1994 prove conclusively that Australia is definitely a great rugby nation – and turning it into the foul agglomeration of human porridge that we saw in Brisbane on Saturday.
There is a mountain of evidence behind the call to sack Schmidt with immediate effect, beyond the bald facts of the defeat. For a start, past experience has taught us that sacking coaches brings results. Indeed, over 90% of successful rugby coaches have taken the job after someone else left it. This is clear proof that the way to succeed as a coach is to replace another coach. It’s only stiff-necked bureaucracy that would have it otherwise. Logic would suggest that it is almost impossible for a coach to win games of rugby without being hired, and yet the bean-counters at RA still refuse to hire him.
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Who do I mean by “him”? Well, there’s any number of candidates. Stephen Larkham. Dan McKellar. Peter Hewat. Michael Cheika. Wayne Bennett. Alan Jones. Greg Martin. Ric Charlesworth. Candice Warner. Any of these would no doubt gladly take the wheel and give it a hefty spin clockwise.
But what if the new coach fails as well, you ask? Well, then we sack him and get the next one in. That’s what’s called “the system working”. It’s a beautiful, elegant thing, and the fact you would want to hinder the process by keeping an incumbent in place for up to a year speaks very badly of you.
There is an old saying in rugby circles that goes something like this: “You can’t make an omelette without a reliable source of heat”. It is time to put the heat under Joe Schmidt and return Australian rugby to the omelette it once was. The Wallabies are going nowhere under Schmidt, as we saw at the weekend. Any half-decent coach would’ve given clear, easy-to-execute instructions to his players, like “Win the ball”; “Don’t concede lots of tries”; “Score lots of tries”; “Be good at rugby”. Instead, Schmidt’s muddled messages failed to penetrate the noble simplicity of his players’ brains and we got…well you saw what we got.
There was a time when Australian rugby would do anything to win, even if it meant sacking up to six or seven coaches a year until one took. I think we need to return to that time. A country that refuses to sack a coach the moment he fails for the first time is a country that is going nowhere. Please, let’s not be that country.
