Andy Capostagno rugby
If Saturday’s final between the Brumbies and the Sharks was the last Super 12 game then we had better cherish it. Next year, not only are there likely to be more than 12 teams in the competition, but it will probably take place midway through or at the end of the season.
So what did we learn in six years of the Super 12? That day in and day out New Zealand has a greater proportion of high-class rugby players than anywhere else on the planet. That Australia with its tiny player base is by necessity the home of innovation. That South Africans don’t travel very well and that the public enjoys strength against strength in its rugby.
This year South Africans learned to travel and that, combined with a crisis of confidence in New Zealand, led to a Brumbies vs Sharks final. The final score, 36-6, might seem humiliating, but there is reason to believe that had the final been played in Durban instead of Canberra, the score line might easily have been reversed.
If Butch James had kicked more accurately in the first half and if AJ Venter had not lost the ball forward with the try line at his mercy the game might have been over by half time, instead of being locked up at 6-6. Instead, the panicking Brumbies were settled by their sapient coach at the break and reminded that they had earned a reputation for carrying the ball, not kicking it away.
There has never been a rugby team quite like the Brumbies. Made up of discards and square pegs, regarded in Australia as the runt of the litter, they came to the first Super 12 with no baggage. Bruce stadium was a rugby league ground, home of the Canberra Raiders and the locals thought union was a game for nancy boys.
So early on Rod MacQueen understood that if his side was to get any bums on seats at all they had to entertain. He built a team that relied on short, quick passing and that understood utterly the fact that you cannot play the game without the ball.
In MacQueen’s first season the Brumbies won seven games and missed out on the semifinals by a single point. After that it was a bit of a roller-coaster ride until he played his masterstroke. Upon being made Wallaby coach in 1998 MacQueen decided to move Stephen Larkham from fullback to flyhalf.
That’s all it took. From that moment on Wallaby and Brumbies rugby had a game breaker in the most important position on the field. Once Larkham had learned to play alongside George Gregan, a Brumbies team that could win at home but lost its pattern away took the extra step.
Eddie Jones inherited a settled squad and a defined playing pattern from MacQueen. With everything in place the Brumbies reached three finals in five years and last Saturday finally won the thing. And as much as Sharks supporters might argue otherwise, the brash, xenophobic Aussies thoroughly deserved to close out the Super 12 in such a manner.
At the beginning of this season insensitive International Rugby Board (IRB) law clarifications threatened to make the Brumbies’ decoy running style impossible. They hammered the Crusaders in the opening game, but lost to the Sharks in Durban a week later with a lacklustre display in killing heat. A week later at Ellis Park they scraped in with a last-minute Rod Kafer drop goal and the critics were beginning to write the Brumbies’ obituary.
If truth be told the Brumbies were never consistently in top gear all season, but there was always the feeling that they had set something aside for a rainy day. Last Saturday they might have walked to the dressing room at half-time to the strains of Frank Sinatra singing, Here’s That Rainy Day.
Thanks to the genius of Joe Roff, the match that should have been over at half-time was over at the end of the third quarter. The crumbs of comfort for the Sharks lie in the fact that they are a young team that has already contested a Currie Cup and Super 12 final. If they stay together they will win something big soon.