Home rule is making it difficult for Pumas to progress
They come to Dublin today a team truly torn
RUGBY in this month has been shaped by 2019. All of a sudden, it seems, the next World Cup is the sun around which everything orbits. The game is rushing towards Japan in two years’ time.
And all Daniel Hourcade can do is sit and wait.
Patience has never been an obvious virtue of Argentinian rugby on the field, but off it their coach, his players and every supporter of the team is obliged to stand by and hope.
They must trust that the country’s sole Super Rugby franchise gets better quickly, that young players being tended at home can improve consistently enough to make the national team competitive, and they must pray that controversial selection policies do not cost the country an opportunity that only comes once in a lifetime.
Twenty-five months ago, after thrashing Ireland in a World Cup quarter-final and finally bowing to Australia in the last four, Argentina seemed primed to become a consistent top-tier team.
They had also reached the last four in 2007, but that was with an ageing squad and, more importantly, under a rudimentary style of play. In 2015, they ripped Ireland asunder through smart, ambitious and technically sophisticated rugby. This was their time. Since then, they have played 28 matches, winning just eight — and four of those wins came against Uruguay, Chile, Japan and Georgia, and two of them against Italy.
The two tier-one sides they have defeated since hammering Ireland are France, in June 2016, and South Africa in the Rugby Championship two months later.
The figures are grim for a country with designs on competing against the best in the world on a regular basis, but they also deserve some qualification. The fact that two of the best three teams in the world make up half the Rugby Championship ensures that Argentina can expect regular beatings; that fate would befall practically every country in the world, outside England, that had to play New Zealand and Australia four times every season.
The same goes for the Jaguares, Argentina’s sole franchise in Super Rugby and a side who are well acquainted with the feeling of dust kicked in their eyes.
They will start their third season in the southern hemisphere’s biggest club competition next spring, and more defeats will come their way. This is accepted by Argentine rugby administrators and management, not because of a defeatist attitude; people should know well enough at this stage, especially in this country, that acquiescence is not a failure that troubles the country’s sporting make-up.
After the 2015 World Cup and the unforgettable job they did on Ireland in the last eight, the determination to get better inspired the decision to select only home-based players — and since the Jaguares are the only professional team in the country, it drastically narrowed the playing pool from which Hourcade could fish.
That is why names like Juan Imhoff of Racing 92, two-time European champion at Saracens Juan Figallo, Patricio Fernandez of Clermont and Marcelo Bosch, another Saracen, are being mentioned so often this past month.
These are among the most notable world-class talents unavailable to Hourcade as a result of the selection policy imposed by the Argentine union.
‘These are politic decisions and politics will decide if that changes or not,’ the coach says carefully when asked about the subject in the team’s central Dublin hotel.
No selector in the world would hesitate to select Figallo or Fernandez if they were available, but it is obvious from Hourcade that this is a sticky topic. A determination to grow home-based prospects could make Argentina self-sustaining to a point they have never been in the past.
There is no guarantee the policy will work, though, and even if it does it requires in the short term a generation to effectively sacrifice their Test careers — and the national team to consequently suffer.
‘If you see it from the sport side, perhaps it is not ideal to have players playing in Europe and then coming to play in the Rugby Championship which is a different type of rugby.
‘It’s a problem for us,’ he says. ‘If we have a player playing a different style of rugby and then you have to bring him back and in three weeks, then you have to coach the team to play in a different style if rugby. That is really a problem for us.
‘What I really want is to bring them home and for them to play with us for the whole season.’
Regular Test losses weakens his case though, as young talents like the brilliant Fernandez or Facundo Isa, now at Toulon, cannot be tempted by the prospect of glory in the blue and white jersey, to reject enormous contracts in France.
And Super Rugby organisers are conscious of the number of meaningless matches in their competition. As long as the Jaguares struggle, the notion of a second franchise from Argentina will remain that: notional.
Another interesting argument put forward in explaining their steep decline since October 2015 is the change in style initiated by Hourcade (below). As with the selection policy, this was encouraged, in part, by the desire to make the country more suited to the modern world.
Their traditional strengths, sourced in a brilliant scrum and a generally ferocious tight five, were complemented by a more positive running game, pivoting around Juan Martin Hernandez but also today’s half backs, Martin Landajo and Nicolas Sanchez. It worked against Ireland, but critics say it has stopped working since then. Adherents say the team cannot hope to improve, let alone compete, in either Super Rugby or the Championship by playing a game that served them for generations. One of the most eloquent critics of the move towards a southern style is Les Cusworth, the Englishman who was part of the management group in 2007. ‘I have always been taught that you play to your strengths and not other people’s strengths,’ he said earlier this month. ‘To adopt the kind of rugby they have done over four or five years, although they have won lots of plaudits, in reality, is that the best for Argentina rugby?
‘Historically, they have been one of the best scrummaging teams in world rugby. That’s not the case any longer. The physicality they brought to the game has become secondary.’
They come to Dublin today a team truly torn, stranded between two styles at one level and, at another, racked by the determination of the country’s rugby governors to make them a self-sufficient superpower.
For now, that looks nothing more than a wild fancy.