If Dave Rennie and Dan McKellar were still coaching the Wallabies, and Michael Hooper and Quade Cooper were in the squad, Australia would be worth a sneaky wee investment to win the Rugby World Cup.
How could a coach with a winning percentage of 38 per cent – the most abused statistic in Australian sport – win a Rugby World Cup? By the same pathway that Eddie Jones can win it.
The Wallabies have won the golden ticket in 2023. They’ll never get a smoother route to the semi-finals, and the tournament-ending injury to Fiji No.10 Caleb Muntz has put another dent in the quality of their group.
From there, it’s a likely quarter-final against Argentina, England, Japan or Samoa – all beatable to varying degrees – and then they’re 160 minutes from lifting the trophy.
This will never happen again. In fact, should the worst-case scenario unfold in France and the Wallabies don’t get out of their group, they’ll likely fall out of the world’s top 10 rankings and find it no easy feat to get back in. By 2027, Samoa and Tonga could really be tooled up with players who have made the eligibility switch (hello Taniela Tupou and Richie Mo’unga).
There is clearly a bit of longer-term thinking in some of the Wallabies’ selections, but no one ever picked a Rugby World Cup squad with the primary perspective of, ‘this may have potential benefits four years later’.
Mark Nawaqanitawase, Max Jorgensen, Samu Kerevi and Ben Donaldson share a lighter moment at training.Credit: Getty
Coaches would be lucky to know what’s going to happen four days from now, never mind four years. Besides, there are far more effective ways of building for 2027 rather than picking a bloke and hoping his form carries on an upwards trajectory and that he doesn’t do a Romain Ntamack a month before the tournament starts.
France have arrived at 2023 due to their investment in their under-20s program and their strong domestic competition – that’s where Matthieu Jalibert has come from to provide a credible alternative to Ntamack.
So, anything less than a semi-final for the Wallabies would be a wasted opportunity, and Rugby Australia knows it. In fact, chief executive Phil Waugh verbalised that, and although the wisdom of putting it out in the public could be questioned, it was an invaluable moment insofar as it told supporters what internal expectations really were – none of this ‘we’re building for 2027’ hedging that has crept in.
The benchmark was set last year. Any Wallabies fan currently more anxious than excited about the Rugby World Cup should be invited to remember that they almost beat Ireland and France in Dublin and Paris with Taniela Tupou injured, Samu Kerevi absent, Mark Nawaqanitawase merely an emerging Test prospect and Tom Hooper at home cutting testicles off bull calves.
They were a whisker away from taking the scalps of two of the best sides in the world – just a few small decisions over 80 minutes – and any decline from that standard in France will not only see them miss the semi-finals, but represent an objective regression.
The Wallabies don’t need a coaching masterclass to make the semis – they just need to get back to where they were in late 2022 and let the returns of Kerevi and Tupou do the rest. Tupou did such a number on the French scrum in the last warm-up game two weeks ago that loosehead prop Jean-Baptiste Gros was relegated to the bench for the opening night fixture against the All Blacks. Tupou’s general play still lacks maturity but when he is scrummaging French props out of the starting XV you know that the power is returning.
There is one caveat. The Wallabies would do well to avoid Argentina in the quarter-finals. With big, bad Marcos Kremer back from a ban, they’ll be better than the side that beat the Wallabies in Sydney in July.
England? They have the curse of the beaten finalist hanging over them. In the 2000s, no team that has lost in a Rugby World Cup final has made it past the quarter-finals of the following tournament. Besides, they simply do not have an Andrew Sheridan to repeat the scrum agony they caused the Wallabies in Marseille in 2007.
This is Australian rugby’s big opportunity, not 2027.
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