Australians, meet Joe Schmidt.
The former Ireland coach got his tenure with the Wallabies off to a winning start last Saturday, beating Wales 25-16 in Sydney. Considering the last time these two sides met saw Australia suffer a humbling 40-6 defeat, a result which ended their World Cup, one would think Australians are happy with any signs of progress.
For the most part, they likely are. However, ex-player Matt Toomua expressed dismay at an element of the Schmidt-playbook which is all too familiar to rugby folk in this hemisphere.
To say Schmidt was the sole reason for the popularity of the scrumhalf box kick increasing in Irish rugby would be an overly simplistic narrative. Regardless, it remains true that, under the Kiwi coach, Conor Murray became one of the world’s best exponents of that particular kick, designed to either pin the opposition inside their own half or win the ball back in the air further down the pitch.
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Toomua, speaking to the website The Roar, was not happy with the frequency of kicks emanating from the boot of Australian scrumhalves last weekend. “It’s very un-Australian in a way,” he said.
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“If you talk to the average punter, they hate it. I think it might be something that Tate McDermott might struggle with in terms of selection. I remember back in the day there was a stat where Nick Phipps only kicked it twice in the whole season for the Waratahs off nine. So it’s not traditionally an Australian part of the game.”
Does Toomua have a case? Firstly, Schmidt clearly thinks he isn’t. The head coach, it seems, disagrees with the theory that McDermott struggles with the boot. “He’s got that really nice long kicking game, high kicking game,” said Schmidt prior to this Wales series. “Those are elements that I think we can make use of.”
Strong kicker or not, McDermott didn’t actually start on Saturday. Jake Gordon was the run-on scrumhalf with McDermott on the bench. Between them, the two nines combined for 15 kicks. In the World Cup defeat to Wales which was the final nail in the coffin of the disastrous – and short – Eddie Jones era, Aussie scrumhalves McDermott and Nic White kicked 10 times.
Further numbers back up the idea that Schmidt has ushered in an era of greater pragmatism. In that World Cup disaster outing, the Wallabies as a squad kicked the ball in play 18 times, good for a ratio of one kick for every seven passes. Last Saturday, that total increased to 31. They kicked roughly every five passes.
Toomua, then, is absolutely correct that Australia are kicking more under Schmidt, both in terms of volume and frequency. When the Kiwi implemented such pragmatism with Ireland, the naysayers were silenced when Ireland won back-to-back Six Nations titles in his first two campaigns.
Toomua and the other dissenters would, you imagine, become less critical if Australia come across similar success. If minded to draw sweeping conclusions from insufficient information, this new approach brought victory against a Welsh side which battered the Wallabies in their previous meeting.
That said, when Schmidt’s Ireland began falling apart at the start of 2019, it didn’t take long for attacking purists to once again rail against pragmatism. As with all tactics, people will be happy when they work, less so when they don’t.
Just one game into his tenure, Schmidt is threatening to spark up an Australian rugby culture war. Whether the fruits of such an approach silence the doubters in the same way they once did in this part of the world will be fascinating.
In any case, Schmidt’s 13th game in charge of Australia will be in Dublin against his former employers. Plenty of time, then, to bed in what he sees as a new winning philosophy for Wallaby rugby.
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