Both teams were last-start winners, but it is impossible to shake the feeling as NSW and Queensland line up for Saturday’s interstate Super Rugby Pacific clash in Townsville that the Doomsday Clock has just moved another minute closer to midnight.
Curiously, though Queensland has won four matches to the Tahs’ three, the ticking is loudest for the Reds as they attempt to qualify for the finals.
They are paying the price for the indiscipline and inaccuracy that cost them “make-able” wins earlier in the competition and they now face a horror run home – with only a solitary home game, against the Blues, offsetting away matches against the Chiefs, Highlanders and Fijian Drua. The interstate game is their best remaining hope of a win this season.
By contrast, the Waratahs have some wriggle room for which they can thank reserve hooker Mahe Vailanu and five-eighth Ben Donaldson for the last-minute try and conversion to defeat the Highlanders last weekend.
Still, if they cannot break through for coach Darren Coleman’s first victory against the old enemy this weekend, then all they might have to show for their season is a series of close losses. Conversely, a win followed by home matches against the Melbourne Rebels, Drua and Moana Pasifika and an away match against the Crusaders gives the Tahs the opportunity to press far deeper into this competition.
Inevitably, this being a World Cup year, the match will be portrayed as a Wallabies’ selection shoot-out, with all the usual suspects pitted against each other – Michael Hooper v Fraser McReight, Jake Gordon v Tate McDermott, Langi Gleeson v Harry Wilson.
Waratahs hooker Dave Porecki.Credit: Getty
Lately, however, a new pairing has come to light, with Queensland hooker Matt Faessler stringing together a series of solid games to put pressure on all the incumbent hookers, including the Tahs’ Dave Porecki. As it happens, Faessler could easily have been playing for NSW. Though a product of Toowoomba Grammar, Jason Little’s alma mater, Faessler had moved to Sydney to raise his visibility after being cut by the Reds in 2021. But just as he was about to play his first trial for Randwick, the Reds sent out a recall.
His high point came when he was chosen as a late replacement in the Wallabies training squad last month – as a fill-in for the injured Porecki – and he subsequently has provided Queensland with what they need from a lineout thrower and scrum organiser.
Porecki, meanwhile, has had a relatively quiet season after the tumultuous year in 2022 when he made his Test debut against England in Perth, where he demonstrated that it wasn’t really so difficult to hit a moving target in a lineout. To that point, however, there wasn’t a hooker anywhere in the country who could land the ball where it was required.
This season, however, it has largely gone quiet on him. With the heat going out of the lineout situation, Porecki has simply done his job for NSW, perhaps a little too efficiently. He scarcely gets a mention these days in commentary and I waited in vain for someone to identify the critical role he had played in getting Izaia Perese over the line for his try against the Highlanders last weekend.
The Wallabies centre had broken the first three tackles but was then teetering, about to be hurled backwards. At that point, Porecki locked jerseys with him and drove him forward through another two defenders to score. It was not the first time that the role of the front-row piggies has been ignored in the dissection of a try.
Hopefully, two of the most exciting young talents in Australian rugby, Max Jorgensen and Tom Lynagh, will be left out of the inevitable Wallabies discussion this weekend.
Lynagh, who pretty much has been faultless for the Reds this season, had the proverbial shocker last weekend against the Western Force, kicking the ball dead from a penalty and then throwing a no-look pass which Force find Zach Kibirige intercepted for a try. It was the moment that every youngster experiences at this level – when they want the earth to swallow them without trace – but, fortunately for Lynagh, Queensland were a mile in front.
There were no such head-hanging moments for Jorgensen against the Highlanders but still there were times when he did appear to be a boy among men. The future is theirs both but perhaps for the moment, they should be allowed to develop at their own pace.
This was always a match that had shaped as a defining contest. Back at the start of the season, when Coleman was making those bold statements about the Tahs finishing in the top four – still a possibility, mind you – it had loomed as a pivotal moment in the season. Same for Queensland, only more so now that the decision has been taken to move Brad Thorn on as coach.
But no one had thought it might well determine whether Queensland or NSW would miss the eight-team finals in a 12-team competition.
