LONG READ Familiar sinking feeling means Wallabies must address defensive flaws

It’s that annoying, frustratingly familiar feeling for the Wallabies and Australian fans this week. Another promising performance that couldn’t be followed up, another rough result to process even though they probably played a couple of steps better than the week before.

The 33-13 Bledisloe Cup loss in Wellington to finish The Rugby Championship was the Wallabies’ third straight defeat, the first time they have experienced such a run under Joe Schmidt.

They finished the tournament in fourth place, and even if the current rankings suggest that’s where they should have finished, it doesn’t remove the sinking feeling of ‘what ifs’ and missed opportunities.

And there certainly were missed opportunities. For the number of times the Wallabies were able to open up the New Zealand defence and find space in the first half, they would certainly have liked more than 13 points on the scoreboard by half-time.

The Australian scrum was strong to this point, and was even winning scrum penalties. The lineout performed well again, but there wasn’t a lot of pay coming out of the maul once again, with the All Blacks’ maul defence perhaps the most efficient it has been during the tournament. They just simply were not going to let Australia score from the lineout drive.

In the first half the Wallabies ran a concerted game-plan to play with more width and were regularly sending forward runners off first and second receiver, amid a broader plan to target defensive seams around New Zealand’s outside centre channels.

And it worked. Australia did make line breaks, they busted tackles, got offloads away, even had success switching the point of attack from the scrum set-piece.

With momentum from the way they finished the previous match in Sydney, this was a really promising next step from the Wallabies, perhaps even the first signs of taking a lesson from one game into the next and enhancing it with the next evolution in their game.

The post-match internal review has likely already been done, but it needs to be the harshest of all the 2024 losses so far.

But it didn’t last. New Zealand made a defensive shift late in the first half, shooting up out wide to turn the Australian attack back into narrower channels where it could be contained far more easily.

Shutting it down at the source of the width gave the All Blacks a pressuring presence at the breakdown, forcing turnovers and winning ruck penalties which helped lay the platform for their decisive try just before half-time, and their 14-point second half.

Their ability to slow down the Wallabies’ supply of quick ruck ball was a major factor here as well, and Schmidt was left to lament the general mess that was allowed at the breakdown, which he suggested went a good way towards upsetting his side’s rhythm after a strong start.

The post-match internal review has likely already been done, but it needs to be the harshest of all the 2024 losses so far.

After finishing just short of a memorable result in Sydney and then opening up the All Blacks as well as they did in the first 35 minutes in Wellington, Australia didn’t have many answers once they encountered these adjustments.

And this is where the familiar feeling took over in the Sunday post-mortems, because a lack of ‘plan B’ has long been a criticism of Wallabies teams for much of the last decade.

The review needed to ask key questions of the game managers and senior players why this was the case, and it seemed from his comments before leaving Wellington that Schmidt was prepared to do that.

Players either don’t know where they need to be and are in the wrong place, or they do know where they’re supposed to be and they can’t get there, which is maybe an even bigger problem.

“As a group of coaches, we’re pretty hard on ourselves – are we managing to get what we need from the group and have we got the right group? There’s a number of things we’ll reflect on,” he said.

“There are a number of positives over the last, certainly four weeks and even the last two weeks against the All Blacks.”

The review should also look critically at the Wallabies’ defensive set-up, which shipped two legal tries and numerous line breaks in the second half as New Zealand’s momentum took hold.

It also highlighted an ongoing issue for Australia over the last few years, where the positioning of the openside winger – who needs to wrap but continues to concede far too much open space for the opposition attack – too often leaves lone Wallabies defenders in no-win situations where they are the only defender in the face of multiple attacking players.

It’s been an issue since at least the Dave Rennie reign, and the result is always the same: the openside winger has either bitten in way too hard with no-one wrapping outside him, or just isn’t in the frame as the line-break is made by the opposition.

This appears to be a plan, and it’s clearly not working. Players either don’t know where they need to be and are in the wrong place, or they do know where they’re supposed to be and they can’t get there, which is maybe an even bigger problem.

The Wallabies can’t continue to defend with this shape and it has to be rectified before they head for their UK tour of the home nations in November.

If that means defensive remedial classes for the outside backs and anyone else that needs them, then so be it – because too many errors are being made and it’s costing the Wallabies games.

The Wallabies have conceded 286 points in their nine games so for this season, at an average of 32 points per game. They’ve also conceded 37 tries in those nine games, and conceded at least four tries in every game bar the first Test of the year against Wales in Sydney, and the win over Argentina in La Plata.

That is a sign of a defensive system that clearly isn’t working and remains in need of urgent attention.

The Boks kept Australia to one try in two games, and the All Blacks to four, and kept both trans-Tasman teams try-less in one match each. Of their three TRC opponents, only Argentina crossed South Africa’s line in both matches.

And when you’re only scoring 24 tries yourself at the same time, that’s simply not a recipe for success, no matter how many incremental improvements a team might be making.

By comparison, South Africa conceded just 10 tries in their six games through The Rugby Championship, while finding the line 24 times themselves. Of those 10 tries, four came against New Zealand at Ellis Park, and four more came in the wild final quarter of the loss to Argentina in Santiago del Estero.

The Boks kept Australia to one try in two games, and the All Blacks to four, and kept both trans-Tasman teams try-less in one match each. Of their three TRC opponents, only Argentina crossed South Africa’s line in both matches.

In Wellington you could again see a Wallabies side making more improvements to their game. The width they played with in the first half, and the precision of their targeted attack at the All Blacks midfield seams, had not been seen to that volume before in 2024, and it did bring success that confirms they were getting plenty right.

But the frustration for Australia fans is that one week’s improvements don’t seem to carry over to the next, with the next improvement seemingly superseding – rather than complementing – the previous improvement.

Over The Rugby Championship, the Wallabies may well have improved in six different areas over the six games, but those six improvements haven’t been stacked on top of each other. There’s still only one, or maybe two, parts of their game that remains enhanced.

When Schmidt speaks of incremental steps being made, Australian fans can easily agree with him, because they’ve seen them too. The issue is that when he speaks of the incremental progress, the assumption is that last week’s improvement remains in place. And that hasn’t been the case.

After just 11 wins from their last 32 games under three different coaches, Australian fans also want to see signs of turnaround at some point.

After the chaos of 2023, Wallabies supporters are prepared to be patient for Schmidt to do his thing. They’re even prepared to wear the ‘short-term pain’ he’s spoken of all year, knowing the renowned coach does indeed improve teams he spends time with.

But after just 11 wins from their last 32 games under three different coaches, fans also want to see signs of turnaround at some point. Yes, new coaches need time to bed down their systems, but last year’s coach didn’t know what his system was from one week to the next, and the coach the year before was in his third season.

If Australia truly are going to get better under Schmidt, he has got to ensure those incremental improvements remain from one game to the next.

The Autumn Nations Series and a potential Grand Slam tour is the next challenge for the Wallabies, and it will be interesting to see how they fare against England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland over four successive weekends.

But more importantly, they have also got to start producing some results – so that Australian rugby fans can see that the short-term pain has been worth it after all.