It’s a beautiful Sunday in Sydney, but the Wallabies have lost.
I was ready to pen an article earlier this morning, as I returned home from watching the World Cup Final at around 6am. As has been the case a few times in this campaign, it would be a raw, stream of consciousness burst that tried to capture the emotion of the occasion in the immediate aftermath of the game.
For these things to work, though, you need to be steaming from the ears, a ball of emotion, wound up and ready to explode with colourful language and weirdly mixed metaphors. You need an injustice, or a thrilling finish, or just a strong feeling of disappointment or joy when the ref blow his final whistle.
But this morning… there was no explosion. No high emotion. No bleeding from the ears. Just a warm glow that we’d just witnessed a great World Cup Final, with the best team winning. So I went to bed.
A part of me wanted to be angry, at someone or something. As is the case on this site, we love a scapegoat on which to blame our teams struggles, whether it’s our five-eigth, the opposition captain, the referee or just the cosmic forces of the universe. I wanted to lash out and say ‘if not for X, we’d surely be champions!’. But try as I might, there was nothing to be found.
Our team played well. There were no clanger moments, no kicks out on the full, passes to no-one or hare-brained decisions. We didn’t let the All Blacks into the game with our mistakes. Every player had a decent game, and those that did make minor mistakes made up for it around the field at some point.
To win these games as the underdog you need it all to go your way. You need to avoid injuries, you need a couple of fortunate 50/50 calls and you need to dig deep when it looks like the game is beyond you. Unfortunately for us we only managed one of those three things last night. That’s rugby.
The All Blacks are worthy champions. To watch Dan Carter in black for (probably) the last time was a thing of beauty, especially considering his struggles over the past three years. To see Richie McCaw make a menace of himself at the breakdown and go toe-to-toe with David Pocock was incredible. Ma’a Nonu is the best player in the world (no matter what the IRB say) and we never had an answer for his mix of deft skill and physicality. It was a privilege to watch them do their thing one final time.
There will be a time for analysis, and working out what went wrong. There will be confected outrage in the media, grainy footage of off-the-ball incidents, breakdowns of refereeing blunders and soundbites from ex-players. But for now let’s just bask in the warm glow of a game well played, and a campaign well run.
I’m proud to be a Wallabies fan today. To win the World Cup they had to knock six of the top ten nations in a row, and we fell 20 minutes short of doing so. Every single player has enhanced their reputation, and the success of the tournament has left Australian rugby in fantastic shape.
We started with Fiji, and then belted England at Twickenham. We survived the Welsh onslaught. We braved Scotland when all looked lost. And we knocked over the Pumas who were playing with skill, flair and reckless abandon. We saved the toughest one until last, but unfortunately just couldn’t get over the All Blacks.
So this is where I end my campaign, my season. As much as I’d like to go out all guns blazing, it just hasn’t been that type of World Cup. We played a belter of a tournament, but were beaten by one of the greatest teams of all time in a game that went to the wire. As I sit in the Sydney sunshine, I can’t summon the rage or angst or giddy joy or bitterness which has come so easily in the past. All I can do is smile, and thank our guys for six weeks of (almost) unending joy. And all the other guys, too.
Well played Wallabies. Well played All Blacks. Let’s do this all again in 2019.
