Rugby v league showdown stuff of fantasy
I know we all went a bit stir-crazy in lockdown, but the idea of the All Blacks playing the Kangaroos is so weird, who would believe it, even if today was April Fool’s Day?
It’d be great if the backroom marketing genius who came up with the concept had an answer to a few leading questions that spring to mind in less than a heartbeat.
What would you do with scrums? What’s called a scrum in league is actually 12 players standing still and not pushing. If you allowed a rugby scrum the poor league guys involved would provide a lifetime of work for a squad of chiropractors.
Would you have lineouts? There are some powerful guys in league, but even Aussie captain Boyd Cordner, the man rated the best second rower in the NRL in 2019, would, at 1.85m, barely come up to Sam Whitelock’s shoulder. Lifting in a lineout would have to reach new levels of skill and elevation for the Kangaroos to win the ball on their own throw.
Would you have rucks? Stealing the ball if two or more defenders are involved in a tackle is illegal in league. So for the Kangaroos to adjust to the idea that at the tackle you can scrap for the ball, would need a mind shift as massive as Health Minister David Clark taking some responsibility for the country’s Covid-19 failings.
Or do you drop contested scrums, lineouts, and rucks, and just have a play the ball at every breakdown? That’d be the only way you’d actually have a contest, one that the Kangaroos could well win, given that they’ve had a lifetime of working out defensive patterns and making headon tackles.
But then it’s not a hybrid game, it’s actually league. So if you were selecting the All Blacks, the pack would consist of 110kg loose forwards, and so, basically, would most of the backs. In other words, it wouldn’t be the All Black team as we know it, and a lot of the novelty of the game would be stripped.
The reality is that games like a Kangaroos-All Blacks match are not even on the same level as a First XV versus the netball A-team game I remember from decades ago at high school. That was funny, but we played only one code — netball. To try to mix sports, even two as superficially similar as league and rugby, is a misinformed stunt doomed to failure.
The Great Redeemer?
Warren Gatland knows what pressure is. After all, he has coached Wales, where, it’s worth remembering, some of their rugby fans are crazy.
He won’t be panicking that in the brutally short and hugely competitive cauldron that is Super Rugby Aotearoa the Chiefs are now two games for zero wins, or that the TAB now sees them as nine-to-one outsiders to win the title behind the
Crusaders (paying $1.67) and the Blues ($3.30).
But it is a slump for a Chiefs side, who back in February after the first two rounds of pre-Covid Super Rugby, had a 37-29 win over the Blues, and a 25-15 victory over the Crusaders under their belt.
All of which makes tomorrow afternoon’s game with the Crusaders in Christchurch very close to a make or break match for the Chiefs.
So much will depend on what happens in the forwards, and that’s where the odds look stacked against the men from the Tron.
Captain Sam Cane returns to the starting XV following a back problem but fellow loose forward Luke Jacobson, who just may be the unluckiest player in the country, is gone for the rest of the competition with a broken metacarpal bone, which crucially connects the fingers to the wrist.
Lock Brodie Retallick is back in New Zealand from Japan, but he knocked back the chance to play for the Chiefs. Retallick would be like gold to the Chiefs if he was playing in Christchurch, because if there’s one thing that makes the Crusaders favourites it’s the veterans they have in the pack. Men such as Whitelock (117 tests), Codie Taylor (50 tests), and Joe Moody (46 tests), provide a grizzled, street-smart core for the red and blacks.
If Gatland can mould, in the limited time he’s had since Covid, an eight that can match the Crusaders, then, as the Welsh once dubbed Graham Henry, it’s Gatland who is really the Great Redeemer.