Almanac Rugby: A tale of two World Cups, or even three
The 2023 FIFA women’s world cup included 32 teams, with as few as four (Zambia, Cost Rica, Vietnam, Panama) identifiable as cannon fodder. The challenge to make it to the quarter finals was arduous: three pool matches and one in the round of 16. There are 20 teams in the men’s rugby world cup, with four pool games and then straight to the quarter finals. Six teams (Uruguay, Namibia, Romania, Portugal, Tonga, Chile) seem to be there as filler. Almost overnight, rugby has gone from being able to boast the second biggest world cup amongst the football codes to holding the third biggest – with daylight between the FIFA events and its.
Which is a worry, given how central the rugby world cup is to rugby’s sense of itself, and, in the Australian context, to its sense of innate superiority over rugby league and even Aussie Rules. Moreover, in reporting on the Wallabies’ test-by-test performances the media narrative until quite recently has been “it’s all about the 2023 world cup”. Now, against the probable failure of the touted smash-and-grab campaign in France, the narrative has been tweaked to encompass preparing for the Lions’ tour in 2025 and even better the world cup in 2027. It calls to mind Ricky Stuart as coach of the Canberra Raiders in 2014 saying they needed a ten year plan. Oh for the days when coaches concentrated on this week’s game.
To be fair to Ricky Stuart, the Raiders made the NRL grand final in 2019 and were dudded by a crucial refereeing error. That the referee suffered mentally for this and only recovered once Stuart and the Raiders reached out to him is one of the more uplifting stories of Australian sport.
But back to rugby, the Wallabies and the world cup.
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Australia’s standing during rugby’s professional era, which started in 1995, has taken a dive since the 2015 world cup. In the leadup to that event Australia was ranked second in the world. In the leadup to the 2019 world cup it was ranked sixth. Now, as of mid-August 2023, it is ranked eighth. On my count, from 1995 to 2015 Australia’s winning percentage for all tests averaged 63% per year. Since 2016 it has been 40%, going as low as 17% in covid-affected 2020 and zero percent so far this year.
All seven countries ranked above the Wallabies have improved their performance against Australia since 2016 compared with the period 1995-2015:
| Opponent Mid-August 2023
Ranking |
Australia’s winning % 1995-2015 | Australia’s winning %
2016-2023 |
| Ireland 1 | 69% | 20% |
| New Zealand 2 | 26% | 14% |
| France 3 | 76% | 50% |
| South Africa 4 | 51% | 42% |
| Scotland 5 | 87% | 40% |
| England 6 | 50% | 9% |
| Argentina 7 | 88% | 64% |
Similarly, Wales (now ranked 10th , down from 5th in 2015) has improved from 87% to 59% and Italy (now 13th , up one place since 2015) from 100% to 67%.
Talent, coaching, management, financial resources – these are all factors that contribute to performance. In Australia pundits have deplored the decline of the Wallabies, and it is ominous that since 2016 even countries such as Wales and England (the latter now ranked 6th, down from 4th in 2015) that have fallen in world rankings have improved their performance against Australia. However Ireland, France and Scotland were ranked 6th, 7th and 10th respectively in 2015. What explains their dramatic rise? Which performance factors have worked especially for them? Instead of the focus being solely on the Wallabies’ decline, these are complementary questions Australian sports journalists should be asking.
Plainly, Andy Farrell, former Great Britain rugby league captain, has proven an exceptionally good coach of Ireland, and the same can presumably be said of Fabien Galthie, France’s coach, while Gregor Townsend has been in the top job at Scotland for six years, suggesting there can be benefits in longevity. But there must be more to the success of these countries than coaching. It is hard to see how coaches can succeed without good management of the game. Rugby Australia notably gets rid of its coaches when good results do not come quickly enough, like an Australian political party despatching its leader. When the RA board and executive are looking for a scapegoat, we know who it will be. Our coaches must be constantly looking over their shoulder. That must tell on their, and their teams’, performance.
Also, in recent years – and this is crucial to questions of both talent supply and money – the Australian Football League and National Rugby League have continued to build in Australia, as measured by rights deals, attendances and media attention, while football (soccer) is enjoying a golden period at the national/international level which might trickle down in ways not seen before. That is, the internal competitive environment has worsened for the Wallabies just as the external one has become more challenging on the field. And it all invites speculation that the other football codes are being better run than rugby.
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Rugby in Australia draws comfort from seeing itself as the game of the establishment, entitled to look down especially on rugby league. Rugby’s sense of class superiority was reflected in its being amateur (at least officially) for so many decades. It was as though if you had to work for a living you shouldn’t be in our game. It used to be that working-class rugby players who had the temerity to earn money from their talent by going to rugby league were expelled from rugby for life. Rugby in Australia has always led the football codes when it comes to having itself on.
Still, it was worse elsewhere. The 2023 rugby world cup is being held in France. Earlier this year the international rugby league was forced to call off the rugby league world cup scheduled for France in 2025 due to a predicted funding shortfall. That world cup, incidentally, would have involved sixteen teams in each of the men’s, women’s and wheelchair categories, even if only four countries (Australia, England, New Zealand and Samoa) would have had a realistic chance of winning the men’s competition. Perhaps rugby diehards who persistently sneer at the rugby league world cup will think twice now that their own world cup has been relegated behind daylight by the FIFA women’s edition. More pertinently, perhaps the French government should have asked the French rugby union to cover the funding shortfall; after all, during World War II the rugby union persuaded the Vichy regime, the Nazi puppet government, to confiscate the grounds and money of the French rugby league and hand them over to rugby union. That’s the establishment for you.
Then there was racist South Africa, for which the Springboks were the national symbol and spearhead. In this regard I am somewhat mystified by Peter FitzSimons’s recent assertion of Australian rugby’s having stood up against apartheid. Yes, in 1971, as Larry Writer’s superb book Pitched Battle tells us, seven Wallaby identities courageously refused to make themselves available to play the touring Springboks and/or became involved in the protest movement, but the Australian rugby union had no difficulty filling teams with players who didn’t care about apartheid. And of course when it came to ensuring Springbok tours proceeded, the rugby authorities in both Australia (1971) and New Zealand (1981) were in cahoots with the political establishment, embodied respectively by William McMahon and Robert Muldoon, admittedly two of the sorriest excuses for prime minister that ever existed. Both were happy to inflict division and violence on their own people in the interests of sustaining the brutal oppression of non-whites in South Africa. At least McMahon was at the tail end of Australia’s pathetic White Australia policy; Muldoon didn’t even have that excuse.
In contrast to rugby’s elitism, rugby league has been a tool for Australian egalitarianism. And with 13% of current NRL players (which would be some 66 men) identifying as Indigenous Australians as against only six players in the super rugby competition, it is easy to tell which code has been better for our First Nations people.
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Desperation for success at world cups, borne of the over-emphasis on world cups, has come to characterise more than the media narrative around Australian rugby. It was there in the departure of coach Michael Cheika for Dave Rennie and then the dumping of Rennie for Eddie Jones. It looked to be there too in Rennie’s conservative selections, especially in the halves, and now in Jones’s radical, youth-based selections, particularly in the halves. It was there in the signing of Joseph Sua’ali’i from rugby league at a reported $1.6m a year, presented as a mighty triumph over the rival code even though the league public was largely indifferent, the ARL itself wished the likes of Sua’ali’i good luck, and RA ended up looking like it was in a one-man pissing contest. It was there when Eddie Jones denounced Australian sports journalists for not being sufficiently supportive of the Wallabies. It is even there in the RA chairman Hamish McLennan’s puerile mocking of rugby league’s scrums. I don’t like saying this, but it will probably take only one more broken neck for the rugby scrum as we know it to pass into history. But then that would be another example of rugby copying a league innovation: think sin-bin, video referees, interchange, the 50/22 rule ….
What does Rugby Australia want? If I had to guess its top priority, I would say securing private equity so it can raid rugby league for talent. Perhaps it wants to fatally wound league, to appropriate its talent base and resources so that Australia rules the rugby planet, like some 21st century sporting version of 19th century imperialism. If that is the agenda it should be abandoned, and not only because of the faint echo with French fascism.
One hopes the prospective equity partners are doing their due diligence, and that RA shows itself to be more than a remnant of the bunyip aristocracy with the economic imagination of Black Jack McEwen and a bad case of arrested development. The first tranche of any additional funds would not actually improve the Wallabies’ performance but simply cover wage inflation caused by the Sua’ali’i signing while also (hopefully) injecting much needed funds into the Wallaroos.
More to the point for prospective partners, rugby league – and Aussie Rules, the ultimate juggernaut – are mass-appeal sports entrenched both deeply and widely in Australian culture. Rugby’s place is more niche and its cultural hold on the country more tenuous.
Again on my count, over the six decades following the creation of rugby league in 1907 the Wallabies could muster a test winning rate of only 30%. One series win celebrated by rugby diehards was Australia’s 2-0 defeat of New Zealand in 1949, but at the time the top 30 (white-skinned) All Blacks were touring South Africa. In the amateur era there would nonetheless be renowned Wallabies performances such as the grand slam tour of Britain and Ireland in 1984 and the world cup win in 1991. After the game went professional in 1995 there was a golden period of 1998-2003 in which Australia won one world cup and reached the final of another, beat the British and Irish Lions in a test series for the only time and dominated the All Blacks, winning nine out of 14 tests; it is to this golden period, one assumes, that RA clings for inspiration.
There have been enormous talents in the game, including Ken Catchpole, Mark Ella, David Campese, John Eales and David Pocock: players known and celebrated well outside rugby circles. So there are brilliant episodes and people in the history of Australian rugby (including the gold medal for the women’s sevens event at the Rio Olympics), but the fact remains that it is 20 years since the Wallabies’ golden period, the rest of the world caught up long ago, and neither rugby nor football has ever come near to matching the NRL and AFL for week in, week out popularity (although the A-League Women’s competition may enjoy a post-Matildas boost). I noticed In 2023 that attendances at super rugby matches stopped being posted to the Austadiums website during the regular season, presumably because they were embarrassingly low.
It needs to be said: one reason rugby union will never match rugby league on a week-to-week basis in Australia is that league is always looking to improve itself as a free-flowing spectacle: yes, with the abandonment of contested scrums some years ago; more recently with its tackle count restart rule. In rugby too many tries are scored through bash-and-barge mauls, there are far too many penalties, and (at least as observed in the super rugby competition) as the game goes on and players tire there are more and more scrums, with the forward packs huffing and puffing before the half-back puts the ball in the second row anyway – another example of the code having itself on. And from where does rugby recruit its referees? National drama schools?
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Perhaps surprisingly, the outlook for the Wallabies at the 2023 world cup is actually not bad.
Australia will be in Pool C. There it can expect to beat Georgia and Portugal. One more win at the pool stage – against Fiji or Wales – would see the Wallabies advance to the quarter finals, where they would probably meet either England or Argentina, those being the likely top two teams from Pool D. An improving Australia is quite capable of defeating either side, even if both should also improve as the tournament progresses, and even if the coaches of both have a point to prove against Eddie Jones.
Victory in a quarter final would mean progression to the semi-finals, in which case Australia’s opponent will most likely come from New Zealand, France, South Africa and Ireland. Australia would definitely be up against it, although anything can happen on the day. In any event, throughout the world cup we should see plenty of such emerging Wallaby talents as Mark Nawaqanitawase, Tate McDermott, Carter Gordon, Angus Bell, Tom Hooper and (if fit) Max Jorgensen, which will be rewarding regardless of results.
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Then Rugby Australia needs to settle down. It doesn’t need to conquer the world. Australians may love winners, but that doesn’t mean they only want winners. Unlike internet trolls, Australia’s decent mainstream will applaud teams that do their best and show courage in a good contest. National pride will come in spades when they exceed expectations, as the FIFA women’s world cup showed. National anticipation will build as an improving team shapes up to those ranked above it.
To settle down RA needs to focus more on the here and now. It needs on the one hand to stop exaggerating past glories, and on the other to stop using the future as justification for poor performance in the present. It should aim to achieve best possible performance on the field year in, year out, freed of the yoke (and excuse) of always building for the next world cup. It needs to show more support for the head coach but also make him more personally accountable by cutting back on the number of assistants and the over-use of technology. And Australian rugby should strive for peaceful coexistence with rugby league, which incidentally is doing its bit for diplomacy in our region with the coming Pacific Championships (men’s and women’s); in any case, while some players are bound to find rugby dollars attractive, League is now too big and rich to fall to a Super League-type raid.
Finally, let the wider Australian sporting public enjoy the opportunity – unique to this country – of following the AFL or NRL in domestic competitions every week, then barracking for teams such as the Matildas, the Socceroos and the Wallabies as they represent Australia on the international stage.
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