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LONG READ How the four-team format will help the Wallabies defeat the Lions

How the four-team format will help the Wallabies defeat the Lions
2 weeks ago

One man’s meat is another man’s poison, as the saying goes. The pros and cons of whether Australia should field three, or four or five franchises in Super Rugby has polarised supporters ever since the creation of two new expansion clubs: the Western Force back in 2005, and the Melbourne Rebels six years later.

The room for a sensible middle ground has been squeezed as voices fled to one end of the spectrum or the other in the fiercest of debates. In the red corner, Eddie Jones made the case for cuts while he was still head coach of England on the aptly named Rugby Ruckus podcast.

“All the political infighting tends to go away when you start winning,” he said. “If I was Australian rugby, I’d just be focusing on how you get back winning.

“Super Rugby went from three to five teams, probably not in the best [interests] of Australian rugby and that helped loosen the club competition.

Melbourne Rebels Rugby Australia Super Rugby
The Melbourne Rebels have been cut from Super Rugby Pacific for the coming season (Photo by Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images)

“As a national coach, you want your best players playing together. And for me, that’s having three teams, and three teams where there’s competition to get into those squads and you battle each other.

“I think if you spread it out too far, you can always try and grow the game but does that add to the national team?

“If the Wallabies win, people will follow rugby in Australia. Everyone loves a winner.”

The ‘meat’ of the three- or four-team theory is that it concentrates more good players into fewer squads, creating intense competition for places and a tougher mentality. As franchises become stronger and deeper they create more chances of winning, and specifically of beating teams based across the Tasman. They build combinations which can progress into the Wallabies with minimal fuss or need for adjustment at the higher level of competition.

The proof of the pudding has been in the eating. The Rebels only had one winning season in 16, and that was in Covid-truncated Super Rugby AU 2020. The Force fared no better, with no winning seasons in 18 attempts. An important spin-off was the dilution of strength in the three existing franchises based in Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane. Up until the Force start-up in 2006, Australian teams had either won, or made the final of Super Rugby in six of its 10 seasons. Since then, those numbers have dropped to four in 17, and they have been reflected in full on the international stage in terms of results against their nearest neighbours.

The logic of the red corner is inarguable: as Australia has expanded its Super Rugby representation, it has weakened the strength of its teams and lost touch with its understanding of what a ‘winning culture’ means, all the way through to the Wallabies. If the Wallabies don’t win, the public showcase fails and rugby’s star falls further in a cut-throat home sports market.

Rugby Australia has been itching to drop at least one of its franchises from Super Rugby for the past five years. The outcome of its first attempt to axe the Force, by force, was disastrous. On 11 August 2017 then-ARU chairman Cameron Clyne announced, “The ARU board has today made the decision to discontinue the Western Force as the Super Rugby competition reverts to 15 teams for the 2018 season.”

The decision provoked a huge backlash in Western Australia. Even at the end of its first season in 2006, the Force had finished with the highest average home attendance of any Australian franchise despite finishing bottom of the table, and boasted the largest membership base with 16,000 members. When the axe fell 11 years later, they were saved by the intervention of billionaire entrepreneur Andrew Forrest, who offered AUD $50m of his own money to save the franchise, or fund a rebel Indo-Pacific tournament to keep it alive and very much playing. By 2020, the Force were back in the fold.

The argument from the blue corner is founded on spreading the rugby gospel and creating new professional pathways in a previously unmined area of the country. The ‘poison’ lies in shrinkage – or in the even more arsenic notion of ‘shrinking to greatness’. In the same week the Wallabies were walloped 57-22 by the All Blacks at Eden Park in August 2021, the Sydney Rugby Union expelled Penrith from its Shute Shield competition, ring-fencing the remaining six clubs while blocking a valuable road into the Western Sydney athletic hotbed.

Rugby Australia finally summoned the gumption to make a second effort at reducing to four in May 2024 by dissolving the Rebels. The club had debts exceeding AUD $23m, including an $11.5m debt to the tax office, a report from the private administrator Stephen Longley remarking the Rebels appeared to have been trading while insolvent for five years.

Wallabies head coach Joe Schmidt and Rugby Australia CEO Phil Waugh have a huge job on their hands (Photo by Jason McCawley/Getty Images)

At the same time, according to Melbourne-based Kiwi journalist Geoff Parkes writing on The Roar: “At a pre-season Rebels sponsor evening on November 24 last year, Rugby Australia CEO Phil Waugh told the local audience how Victoria was ‘leading the way’ with regard to connecting the amateur and professional game, using the catch-cry, One team from club to country. Yet within a fortnight, Rugby Australia had switched paths. As their actions would increasingly show, they had determined that the Rebels were no longer ‘family’.”

Is the cost-cutting exercise RA has undertaken worth the chop to pathways? Amid a storm of suit and counter-suit, it seems it will be left to the courts to decide the legal accountability in Aussie, and whether five can be cut to four. As Parkes concluded in his article: “There is a rugby demographic in the outer suburbs of Melbourne waiting to be tapped into, to deliver many more Wallabies and Wallaroos. With traditional private school pathways increasingly populated by NRL and AFL interests, Australian rugby can’t wait for the lawyers to conduct their business. It needs these kids back in the rugby family today.”

It is certain there will be far more chance of sustaining a winning Wallaby culture with more intense competition for squad places at Super Rugby level. It is extraordinarily hard to teach people how to win as internationals when they have only ever learned how to lose on the tier below.

It is time for the spell to be broken, and the process starts with beating the Kiwis regularly in Super Rugby. The two biggest beneficiaries from the demise of the Rebels will be the traditional twin powerhouses of Queensland and New South Wales, and they have made strides in recruitment where it really matters, in the front five forwards.

New Waratahs head coach Dan McKellar is a forwards specialist who will now have Taniela Tupou, Isaac Aedo-Kailea to add to Angus Bell and injury returnee Dave Porecki in his front-row, and all four should make Joe Schmidt’s Lions squad next July. The Reds meanwhile have beefed up their stocks with the addition of two Rebels who will really suit the Les Kiss style in the shape of Lukhan Salakaia-Loto and Josh Canham. Both can run and handle while attending to the basic second row chores at lineout and scrum.

With Ryan Smith and Angus Blyth supporting LSL and Canham, Kiss will be free to discover just how good Seru Uru can be at six for club and country. Uru started on the blindside flank in the Wallabies’ win over Wales and it was surprising he did not retain his place the following week against Scotland.

The Queenslander managed to pack four lineout takes, 10 carries, 10 tackles with no misses and one breakdown steal into his 59 minutes on the Principality Stadium pitch. If there is one word which encapsulates Uru’s play for a such a big man, it is ‘speed’: speed into the air at lineout time, speed leading the line up in defence and on defensive sprints in cover, speed at presenting the ball in contact.

The number of metres made rarely presents the full picture of a ball-carrier’s value to his side. Like any good Kiss-trained forward, Uru presents the ball very quickly in contact, with nine of his 10 carries producing lightning-quick ball.

 

 

Instant delivery at the ruck allows Max Jorgensen and Andrew Kellaway in the first instance, and Jorgensen and Tom Wright in the second, to curl around the right corner and find space out wide.

In a pack based around Will Skelton, you need at least two lineout targets with outstanding speed off the ground, and Nick Frost and Uru supplied that against Wales.

 

Uru is very quick to get in front of Frost to block on the short side of the catch, and Skelton’s power does the rest on an unstoppable rumble to the line.

Uru’s speed enables him to make some great recovery sprints and double efforts on defence.

 

 

In the first clip, his task is to turn out from inside defence and lengthen stride to match the Wales nine. Secondly, he is free to join the choke tackle and ensure the outcome is a turnover scrum. In the second clip, he is leading the Wallaby line speed initially, then peeling away to win a breakdown pilfer penalty once the first effort is over.

Meat or poison, the reduction to four franchises can only help the Wallaby endeavour to hunt the British & Irish Lions next July. Australia always used to be the ultimate sporting winners, maximising their resources until success against the odds became not just possible, but instead a probability.

Those days in Australian rugby are long gone, but a greater concentration of talent in the tight five forwards will grant the Waratahs and Reds especially a shot at meeting their Kiwi opponents on even terms. It may even give them a chance to win the tournament in toto. Winning against teams from New Zealand has become a habit sadly forgotten in Aussie rugby circles.

If those two traditional strongholds can get their houses from numbers one-five in order, they may yet unearth an unexpected platform from which Australia can attack the Lions. They may be able to establish Uru and Skelton as part of a key back-five combination in the process. Long-term poison be damned, the Wallabies need to eye the meat sitting right in front of them.

Comments

115 Comments
G
Guest 10 days ago

Thanks Nick, if I remember rightly we (Rebels) benefitted big time from the Force falling over on paper, this time the talent seems a bit more distributed. Trouble is, the results did improve slightly in the short term (they literally couldn't possibly get worse after 2017) but IIRC players were even harder to keep a hold of.


I like your idea of an Aussie partnership with overseas clubs, it seemed like London Irish were heading that way a few years ago.

J
JW 11 days ago

Wow, the case of Australian Rugby. It doesn't really need or want divisive articles like this, that's for sure!

At the same time, according to Melbourne-based Kiwi journalist Geoff Parkes writing on The Roar: “At a pre-season Rebels sponsor evening on November 24 last year, Rugby Australia CEO Phil Waugh told the local audience how Victoria was ‘leading the way’ with regard to connecting the amateur and professional game, using the catch-cry, One team from club to country. Yet within a fortnight, Rugby Australia had switched paths. As their actions would increasingly show, they had determined that the Rebels were no longer ‘family’.”

Lets just start with the elephant in the room. Everybody had the same problem with that neighbour, Australia were still the second best rugby nation in the world for large periods of the 'present' window. There was still the other 2/3s of the competition to win against.

The outcome of its first attempt to axe the Force, by force, was disastrous.

The outcome was great. As has been shown recently (with money not becoming a problem), the Force just want to be a rep team. They belong in a competition like the Bunnings NPC, not an elite competition like Super Rugby. Their hearts not in it. The game would have been so much better off if Twiggy had been able to setup rapid rugby.


As it was COVID delivered the Force a great opportunity to step up to the SR plate by bringing in a heavy overseas contingent, both players wanting to return home, and in the case of Argentinians, wanting to remain in SR. Their hands remained in their pockets. That was a golden opportunity to snap up some of the Rugby Championships best talent and keep a heavy Argentinian flavour to the competition, and who knows, perhaps even pathing the way for an easy return of jaguares a couple of years after COVID. Perhaps even by hosting a lot of games in the same region!

Rugby Australia CEO Phil Waugh told the local audience how Victoria was ‘leading the way’ with regard to connecting the amateur and professional game, using the catch-cry, One team from club to country. Yet within a fortnight, Rugby Australia had switched paths.

These are some pretty poor quality views to share. The financial state of Rebels is no reason not to acknowledge success. This just sounds like a bitter local, or someone making up stories along the same lines of the clubs own skullduggery.

It is certain there will be far more chance of sustaining a winning Wallaby culture with more intense competition for squad places at Super Rugby level.

The two biggest beneficiaries from the demise of the Rebels will be the traditional twin powerhouses of Queensland and New South Wales, and they have made strides in recruitment where it really matters, in the front five forwards.

From an outsiders view it seems to be helping the English game nicely, and is just the right timing for a similar short term boost to the Aus game. There is a surprising, and shocking, amount of depth needed for such a short competition.


It's good to see a way forward. The Australian story is definitely a case of missed opportunities, and it is that which needs to be told as theres far too much doom and gloom coming from their fans as it is.

N
NB 11 days ago

Sure.

M
Mitch 13 days ago

The results against Kiwi sides improved in 2024, with the Reds and Brumbies picking up a win each in New Zealand. The redistribution of talent from the culled team looks to be better than in 2017 when the Rebels looked like a loveless marriage between the themselves and the Force.

N
NB 13 days ago

Yes it was lopsided in 2017. IIRC most of the Force went to the Rebs and they didn't make much use of them!

M
MB 13 days ago

The Reds did very well last year against NZ teams in the regular season, winning 3 out of 5. They lost after the buzzer to the Hurricanes at a neutral venue, beat the Chiefs at home, flogged the Highlanders at home, lost after the siren to the Blues at home (game of the season!), beat the Crusaders away (who were much stronger than earlier in the season). Sadly the Chiefs smashed them in the quarter final though!

S
SK 14 days ago

This was honestly the best outcome for Australian Rugby. Now with more depth and money in each franchise they can focus on retaining talent while building depth and quality. If the Aussies can beat the Kiwis consistently this year and make it all the way to the final then perhaps a victory against the Lions is not mission impossible as their progress in Super Rugby would indicate an improvement in depth, quality and product. The Kiwi franchises do look strong though but one or two departures to Japan and up North may affect them and the quality of their depth. I am looking forward to the new Super Rugby Pacific season. It promises to be really intriguing and plenty of good matches to look forward to. Lets hope its a good one. As for the Lions at the start of Rugby Championship we were all talking about how the Wallabies would take a big beating from the Lions. Well the Six Nations will be very important to see if the prospective Lions players are as intimidating as we once thought. After the Autumn Nations series Ireland look less formidable, England look vulnerable everywhere, Wales are an absolute mess and Scotland look like the only one of British teams making any progress. While each team will contribute the best players to create a World Class team the narrative has changed. The Aussies have a better scrum compared to before, decent forwards and penetrating backs. Super Rugby will be needed to enhance their strengths. I hope Joe Schmidt can get involved somehow with the development of these players during the season. He will need every last one of them to improve to stand a chance. At least now there is a chance. The gloom has lifted and the Wallabies look on the up again. Most importantly they look hard to beat and were a difficult opponent in all their Autumn matches. You would not have said the same 12 months ago.

N
NB 14 days ago

It was and is still messy but it is also hard to see how RA could have continued as it was SK.


You have to build from sustainable foundations and they could not sustain five teams. I think there are ways to keep the pathways in VA alive and revive the idea of a semi-pro or full pro team there in future, but it has to be systematic not just hopeful.


I agree that the Lions series now looks a whole lot more balanced tha it did before Novemeber. There will be weaknesses there that Aussie can exploit if they are alive to them.

M
Mzilikazi 14 days ago

All well and good to condense down to four, or even three teams. But there is a downside in my view. That means there will be a cadre of good players of potential who are bound to miss out. A few of these will have the potential to become really top players. Some will be spotted by overseas teams and snatched away. Think Hansen, Tuipuluto.


I was talking to a friend in Ireland a couple of years ago, he commented on this problem there. "Good players not in the four provincial teams don't have much open to them. Only the AIL". Only France in world rugby have the answer, with their layers of leagues leading to the top echelons.

J
JW 11 days ago

Well said, it is a good short term boost at just the right time though. Change is always good, a rocket up the a$$ was needed.


AIL is amateur right? Holds to those principles? I still think a system like Irelands has a lot of advantages of the French's. That struck by stars approach/system they have is just that in a lot of cases.

R
RugCs 14 days ago

At the end of the day it comes down to the number of professional players, Aus is reducing their professional footprint from 200 professional players to 160 players. That is 40 players not playing professional rugby. If the players that miss out on domestic contracts end up playing in the NH and are eligible to play test match rugby for their country then having only 4 pro teams is not a problem, but RA are screwing themselves by locking out overseas based players.

N
NB 14 days ago

What worries me about the Sione Tuipulotu situation is tht he was one of the first academy products to play for Melbourne but they still could not see his potential, at least not enough to keep him Miz. Despite watching his progress all along.


I am not sure that cadre will miss out, at least not if they choose to stay and fight for a spot. That is what they will have to do in England or France anyway - though maybe not so much Japan!

B
Bull Shark 14 days ago

This is true. SA has a variety of teams that have consistently provided the starting place for some springbok greats over the years. The Pumas and Cheetahs come to mind.


The concentration of springboks at the Sharks, in my opinion, crowds out options for youngsters coming through. For example. So some good unheard ofs may well emerge yet from teams like the Pumas.


You’re spot on - it’s not the number of teams that’s the issue but how they are strategically USED to build talent pipelines.

t
tp 14 days ago

Principle and practically I agree with your perspective, Nick. Expansion of teams was supposed to bring in extra players from across Vic / WA and provide a home for fringe NSW / QLD players (aka the Brumbies…) , more players, more revenue etc. and while there are exceptions, the numbers didn’t come through as per the respective business plans of the day. Unfortunately meaning ARU / RA could no longer practically afford to the fund their expansion principle. Finger can be pointed everywhere, but we are where we are and so to an eye to the future… really looking forward to Super Rugby this year. Reds have bolstered well off a base of stability, tahs have (by necessity) completely reset the coaches box and have a front row / back row and back 3 that will be fascinating, brumbies trusting their pathways of youngsters coming through and force have recruited well, just wish they had a bit more fire power. With regards to next few years, RA now forced to live within it’s means and no longer handing out monster deals (JAS a legacy of the old regime), unfortunately means likes of Mark Nawa departing, but instead that money now locking a lot more of the u18-u20 talent and giving them a lot more games, of which we won’t see on the international stage until RWC and beyond. Fingers crossed the injury gods are friendly to wallabies for Lions tour (can’t help but think it’s a year too soon), but plenty of talent coming through for RWC, in both tight 5 and inside backs.

J
JW 11 days ago

Yeah I think it might have been one of these aussie focused jounralists that came out with an article that highlighted some key factors that resulted in a heavy talent drain just after they had exapanded. Not enough ducks in the row to make it work.


That said, if the Vic people referred to in this article actually turned up to their teams games and had as good a following as WA were wouldn't be having this discussion. And I think the Rebels has some good teams/signings, and were likely just unlucky to not get as good of a result needed to kick start things.

N
NB 14 days ago

Yes if you look across to American Sports like NFL and NBA, expnasion franchises are set up to achieve playoffs within 2-3 years. They are the chief beneficiaries of draft donations and veteran free agents from other clubs to strengthen the roster and make them contenders asap. Aussie could not do that.


So you have to reluctantly cycle back back to the point at which you made he mistake and start again from there. With four I reckon Aussie will be competitive again in SRP and give NZ a proper run for its money.

d
dw 14 days ago

The nsw and qld teams do look stronger for 2025. Do you think Dan M might take longer to get success as he is new and has a new squad?


Also great mention of the Penrith Emus. The neglect of rugby in Sydney outside the 'traditional' private school areas has had a lasting effect with many sports fans in Sydney. They wouldn't know or care when the wallabies play.

N
NB 14 days ago

With the squad and recruitment Dan M had from the Rebs I think you should see an immediate turnaround in NSW. They recruited well in the tight five and should be able to field a big, heavy, phsyical T5 with the front rowers I mentioned plus Amatosero and Angleo Smith.

t
tp 14 days ago

I coach a junior rugby team in Sydney and the talent out west is immense and there are really great, well run rugby clubs doing a great job for a heap of young boys and girls involved in and loving Rugby (and as most kids in Sydney anyway, play league as well). A lot of the competition goes quiet as kids hit high school (with the best of the best from out west on RL funded private school tuition through GPS / CAS schools). the challenge / opportunity is how to keep “the rest” of 14-19 year olds playing rugby in strong comps who aren’t affiliated with the existing comps…


Keeping kids in sport at the u14 age group not just a challenge for RA, but also cricket, netball, and the other footy codes so the competition well and truly on to keep the smaller playing base is hot!

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