Your right Aussie D about Link, and I think it sums up why the current predicament is so difficult.
The team was as listless as I've ever seen it on Saturday. So you want to point fingers at coaches, players, administrators.
But I just saw the World Cup! I fucking know these guys can do it! I saw Ledesma turn our scrum into a weapon, I saw Bernie Larkham draw great work from Bernard Foley and I saw Nathan Grey orchestrate a defensive performance that saw us hold out Wales with 13 men.
That's what makes this so weird for me. These coaches haven't all of a sudden turned into failures.
It's similar to Link - a few bad months doesn't turn him into a bad coach. The results he achieved with Queensland were astounding, akin to what Cheika did at the Tahs.
This game is so fickle, so infuriating sometimes. I'm not sure you can 'fix' this, or find lessons in it. Eventually we will start winning games again, sure. But it's the last few months have been totally perplexing.
.
Is it so perplexing?
- we had a pretty good run-up campaign pre the RWC, an extended period for the team to gel
- we played Wales who we have consistently beaten for years now and not a well-coached team
- we played an England that was also, certainly in that period, not well coached and based around some serious selection oddities during the RWC (we soon came to see what England could do when much better coached by EJ (Eddie Jones) and under a totally new coaching team in 2016)
- the team of lesser lights in overall player quality terms, Scotland, that IMO was well coached by Cotter and who clearly worked out our vulnerabilities, very, very nearly knocked us over
(NB: before anything is said, I am NOT detracting from the RWC Wallaby achievements, I was delighted by them, but in the cold light of day the competitive quality of the then opposition must also be analysed in context.)
- as we entered and finished the 2016 Super season, the coaching, playing, skills and fitness caliber of most if not all of our Super teams were in aggregate generally mediocre to very poor. Good Australian coaching was rarely evident anywhere, two Aus Super coaches were justifiably sacked, the Brumbies and Tahs were slowing degrading from years past, etc with the essential truth being that the best 30-40 Aus players exited this Super season in a poor state with no doubt inner confidence levels probably lower than they have been for a long time
- note that Cheika does not improve his national coaching team over this whole period, other than dispensing with the hapless Malone and, very late in the piece bringing in a badly needed M Byrne. He still lacks many 'normal' specialist national coaching positions that the best teams possess and his coaching team is, remarkably, mostly part-time
- then true disaster strikes - a 0-3 result at home v England in front of good home crowds. EJ (Eddie Jones) has quickly transformed England (and as above his whole coaching team) and equally ascertained all the weaknesses in Wallaby skills and that of our reckless yet sole playing doctrine of obsessive ball-in-hand rugby with no other options and variations. The 2016 England coaching group has figured out how to consistently dominate the Wallabies whereas in the 2015 RWC there was no evidence of that coaching skill
- even in T3 v England, we barely improve whilst England notably improves every game, this being a sure sign of a weakened and stressed Wallaby coaching group unable to innovate or dig its way out against a good, but certainly not outstanding, England team. Following this unprecedented debacle, surely the Wallaby players and coaching team left the series very badly scarred and shaken. The lack of consistent skills, the poor game plans, the endless unforced errors were really no better in T3 than in T1, it must have been a lingering devastation for the whole Wallaby system
- Enter Bled 1. Horror story of England series still fresh with attendant wiping out of all Wallaby RWC confidence, same coaches, similar playing group, and we are up against a superbly coached, still-improving AB team with a successful RWC campaign right behind them and invaluable video analysis from our England series highlighting serious Wallaby weaknesses that they'd know the same Wallaby coaching group would likely not fix, or fix quickly enough. They smelt blood and they knew how to suck it
So, when we assess the 2015-16 Wallaby and Aus Super season's matches' chronology, the resulting outcome sequence and the highly varying calibre of coaching and team oppositions we have faced, are the latest Wallaby outcomes really perplexing at all?