Chiefs show they know how to play with a mean streak
Fiery forwards provide the steel to complement the silk of their backline.
MANYof my childhood memories revolve around going to Hamilton from Waihi and watching Waikato teams smash the life out of Auckland sides.
The name of the ground has changed, from Rugby Park to FMG Stadium Waikato, the playing surface has improved from cow paddock to bowling green, but one thing stayed very much the same when the Chiefs faced the Blues.
The men from Moolooland know how to play angry.
The Blues’ fate was sealed from the moment Steven Luatua was ordered off, but even before that wildly reckless moment the Blues forwards were struggling.
At the lineouts Brodie Retallick was a looming, threatening figure. The Blues scrum was under huge pressure, and, most vitally, at the breakdowns the Chiefs, with Retallick and Liam Messam prominent, were ruthless, smashing over the ball, and either winning it, or making the feed for Blues halfback Augustine Pulu slow and awkward.
For two weeks in a row the Chiefs have come to the game with a real edge, so niggly that Aaron Cruden may be the only first-five in the country who shoves and niggles as play breaks up.
Only the Chiefs know what’s driving the aggressive mindset, but if they have developed an Us and Them philosophy (think Strippergate, and the grumpy reaction of Cruden when he became one of dozens of players whose offshore contract details reached the public arena) it may not be a bad thing.
When the Crusaders won their first title in 1998, one of the drivers was that they were given so little chance against the Blues in the final.
There is no question the skill sets of rugby players now are light years ahead of the amateurs of the past.
But, as it was in the 1960s, as it is in the 2010s, the game remains physical, to the edge of brutal, and the steel and silk combination the Chiefs have, of fiery forwards, as hard as anvils, providing the ball so backs like Cruden, Damien McKenzie and Tim NanaiWilliams can smoothly glide past tacklers, is hugely potent.
Eddie Jones, we’ve discovered, loves a joke as long as it’s not on him.
Eddie huffed, puffed and pulled out the weakest card in the outrage pack, ‘‘it’s not rugby’’, when his robotic England players were revealed as not the sharpest knives in the drawer against Italy.
The Italian side refused to engage at the breakdown, meaning there was no offside line. England panicked.
‘‘I’m the referee, I’m not a coach,’’ was the brilliant response of Romain Poite when England’s James Haskell begged Poite to tell the English how to form a ruck.
There’s more than a little irony in the fact that rugby itself, if the William Webb Ellis myth is to be believed, was founded on a schoolboy Ellis handling the ball at a football match at Rugby School. He did so, a famous plaque at the school proclaims, ‘‘with a fine disregard for the rules’’.
For my money the best, and certainly the funniest disregard of the rules, was inspired by a Wallabies coach, Darryl Haberecht, who in 1975, while coaching New South Wales Country, noted there was nothing in the rulebook that mentioned a player sticking the ball up his jersey.
So late in a grudge match against NSWTown in Sydney, the game in the balance, a penalty was awarded to Country. The call went out to use what Haberecht had named ‘‘Tap 5’’ in training, but which would instantly become known as ‘‘the ball up the jumper’’.
The team’s halfback, John Hipwell, took the ball. Around him in a horseshoe stood the rest of the team. All of them had their hands inside the front of their jerseys.
As they shuffled forward Hipwell slipped the ball to No 8 Greg Cornelsen who stuck the ball up his jersey (and three years later would become an Aussie legend by scoring four tries against the All Blacks at Eden Park).
Years later Cornelsen would say: ‘‘I was hoping they weren’t going to use it. Jesus, I was petrified. I thought the ball could get caught up in my jumper, and I’d get rucked to death or something.’’
But Cornelsen did as he was told, his team-mates scuttled in various directions, the city slickers didn’t know whether to chase, tackle, or just whine at the referee, spaces opened, Cornelsen pulled the ball out, a few passes later Brian Mansfield scored for Country, the conversion went over, and the game was won, 22-20.
The IRB, about as amused as Eddie was in Rome, banned the move within six months.