Rampant New Zealand run riot over Wallabies in Sydney
DETECTIVES in Sydney began their working day investigating allegations that the All Blacks‘ hotel team room had been bugged. They finished it pursuing two new lines of inquiry.
Each is likely to result in the old rivals facing very different charges – the Wallabies of impersonating a Test rugby team, the All Blacks of running a monopoly in violation of Australia’s Competition Commission.
New Zealand’s formal complaint to police that a ‘listening device’ had been found in their inner sanctum evoked memories of Watergate, of G Gordon Liddy and the White House ‘plumbers’ whose break-in at the Democratic party’s headquarters ultimately caused Richard Nixon’s Presidential head to roll.
For all his skullduggery, ‘Tricky Dickie’ never had to endure an international football occasion quite as embarrassing as the one witnessed across Australia last night from the Tasman to the Pacific. The Wallabies sank almost without trace, submerged in an ocean of their own incompetence.
History, of course, has a nasty habit of repeating itself. Nixon’s plumbers, hired to prevent further leaks of damaging information, unleashed a tidal wave of destruction upon themselves after their bungled break-in.
That the All Blacks should unleash something similar in response to claims that a microphone had been hidden in a chair ought not to have surprised anyone.
The Wallabies sprung so many leaks that their marooned coach, Michael Cheika, could do worse than find a latter-day Noah to knock up an ark for this week’s return on the far side of the Tasman.
At a time when Union in Australia finds itself engaged in an increasingly desperate fight to keep its head above water, nobody could remember the Wallabies ever having been so completely outclassed on home soil.
One team was so bad, the other so good that had the Wallabies lost by 60, they could not have complained. For Aussies, humiliations in the Test arena do not come any worse than that.
Even with two matches to go, the Bledisloe Cup remains a hopelessly lost cause, as it has been now since Usain Bolt won his first major title as a 16-year-old in 2002. A 14th straight series victory awaits the All Blacks, a monopoly which makes Jamaica’s invincible Olympian look a bit of a flyby-night in comparison. When the Anzac foes last met, at Twickenham in the World Cup final, the Aussies lost by 17 points. Last night they lost by twice as many, relieved that the margin had not been trebled. And if that doesn’t sound startling enough, the fact that the All Blacks are able to inflict defeats on such a scale so soon after losing almost half their team is even more startling. Most of them happened to be all-time greats but then who needs Richie McCaw’s leadership when Kieran Read wears the armband? And who misses Dan Carter when the sublime Beauden Barrett pulls the strings? Some in Australia should have asked themselves those questions before the event, including one who ought to have known better, Mark Ella, left. During all the phoney prematch guff, Australia’s wondrous fly-half of the Eighties came to a sneering conclusion about Steve Hansen’s status as a double World Cup winning coach.
‘‘Mickey Mouse could coach the All Blacks to victory,” Ella said in a newspaper column in which he hinted at Hansen‘s ‘jealousy‘ over Cheika winning the World Cup coach of the year award.
In an ill-advised leap to defend Cheika, Ella then made the most ludicrous claim of all, that the “jury was still out” on Hansen.
This is the man who, in a matter of months, has rebuilt the world champions into an even more formidable force. Their rejuvenation is nothing short of staggering, even by All Black standards.
For yesterday’s start of the Rugby Championship, they kicked off with just six occupying the same positions they occupied at Twickenham last October – one behind the scrum (Aaron Smith), the rest in the pack (one prop, two locks, two in the back row).
A few others reappeared in slightly different guises, Ben Smith on the wing instead of at full-back, Dane Coles playing all but the first three minutes only because of Codie Taylor’s concussion and Julian Savea re-cast in a supporting role.
In contrast, Cheika had responded to the English whitewash by sending for a trio of reinforcements from France – Matt Giteau, Will Genia and Adam Ashley Cooper, thereby reuniting almost his entire World Cup final XV. Giteau, cruelly forced into an early exit at Twickenham last October, suffered another even earlier one after a hopeless attempt to defy a damaged left ankle.
Genia, once the best scrum-halves in the world, hadn’t been involved in a meaningful match for months and played like it, suffering by comparison at every turn to his successor in global terms, the peerless Aaron Smith.
As for Ashley-Cooper, the All Blacks imposed such complete control that he was kept waiting almost until halftime for his first touch of the ball, and then only by courtesy of a rare Isreal Dagg fumble .Virtually an hour had gone before someone got round to giving the doublebarrelled wing a pass by which time the Wallabies had been shot to pieces.
Just when he could not have imagined clutching at a shorter straw, Ashley-Cooper found the shortest of one of all in the form of the excruciating half-time interview although that was too grand a word for the exchange.
To his credit, the veteran wing told it as it was: “Mate, they’re all over us.”
And yet the Wallabies dared to lead the most onesided of all Bledisloe Cup matches for all of three minutes. Bernard Foley landed the opening blow from a short-range penalty in the third minute. The implosion began in the sixth.
Giteau’s loose kick invited Dagg to launch a sweeping five-pass attack for the unsung Ryan Crotty to leave three Australians floundering in his slipstream. His stylish finish set the tone for a team to whom style is everything.
It was never better exemplified than Barrett rounding off an eight-pass move with a ghostly run reminiscent of Barry John. Again the hapless Wallabies made it possible, losing two lineout throws in 30 seconds, the first to Read, the second to Brodie ‘Gigantic’ Retallick.
Four more tries followed, including Savea’s 40th in his 44th Test, and but for an accidental off-side Retallick would have had one of his own as fitting reward for further confirmation of his status as the supreme, all-court second row forward.
Admittedly, the Wallabies had to cope with losing so many inside centres – Giteau, Matt Toomua, Rob Horne – that substitute scrum-half Nick Phipps wound up on the left wing from where he poached a late try.
Even without that recurring dislocation, the result would probably have been the same.
No wonder their veteran skipper Stephen Moore sounded almost speechless: ‘‘I don’t know what to say…”
And to think he has to go and do it all over again in Wellington next Saturday. That, like the police investigation, seems to be another open-and-shut case.