Imagine you have an old friend visiting from overseas. You have been struggling financially over the last few years but you know your old friend is a bit posh, to the point of being entitled. So you do your very best to switch on your gold-star hospitality to show your guests the highs of the local sights and supply them with all their needs and wants.
It’s been a long time since they last visited. Twelve years to be exact, and it appears time has changed them. They are not the free spirits of their previous visits in 1989 or 2001. They are no longer very social and appear to be happy to stay at home by themselves and not get out and mix with the locals.
No matter how hard you try, your guests have complained from day one, constantly telling you that what you are doing is simply not good enough. Worse than finding fault, their complaints have become derogatory. They directly compare you with other trips they have taken in the past to places such as New Zealand and South Africa. Even though you know they are lying, because their last voyage to South Africa was an unmitigated disaster. They start telling you that they are so vastly superior to you that they are unsure whether they will ever visit again.
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Being Australian, there are things you would like to say that would give you great satisfaction, such as “Go and get a rat up ya”, but your mother taught you not to be rude to guests. However, you have had enough. A switch finally flicks and you react, standing up to the rudeness of the guest bully.
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Last Saturday, in front of the largest ever crowd to watch a Lions Test match, the Wallabies flicked their switch. Enough was enough.
Before we get to the controversy, and in my opinion blatant officiating errors of the final few seconds, let us wallow in the joy of being privileged to watch one of the best international matches in recent years and an all-time great Lions fixture.
It was, as we say, a proper Test match.
It was a pulsating game of free-flowing, running rugby. It takes two teams to create a great match and the Wallabies’ opening 40 minutes was exceptionally entertaining, proving what I have always maintained, that with all their players available, Australia can still muster a highly competitive 23. In Melbourne, they were more than competitive, they were superb.
Once again, the Lions played high-tempo, ball-in-hand, creative running rugby. They put to death any lingering memories of the horrid tactics used on the 2021 South African tour and recreated the legendary playing spirit of celebrated Lions teams from the past.
Andy Farrell, Maro Itoje and their team deserve great credit for playing adventurous, entertaining and accurate running rugby from day one of this tour.
If only their administrative overlords and sections of their travelling media on the tour had acted with more grace and diplomatic respect to take the time to understand the dire situation of their hosts before making so many ignorant comments when dealing with the Australian rugby community, then this Lions tour would have been remembered as a success both on and off the field.
However, as the old saying goes, every dark cloud ...
An unexpected byproduct of the Lions’ incessant moaning is that it has united the Australian rugby community in a manner that has not been seen since the Wallabies made the 2003 World Cup final. This is an unexpected gift to Australian rugby from the Lions.
It is a great shame that such a wonderful second Test was burdened by an unwanted controversy as its final action.
Suppose Australians complain about the decision not to penalise Jac Morgan’s heavy contact on the neck of Carlo Tizzano in the lead-up to Hugo Keenan’s winning try. In that case, they risk placing themselves in the hypocritical position of whining like they have accused the Lions of doing.
However, once the actions of Morgan were referred to the TMO, there is no doubt in my mind, and many others, that direct shoulder contact to the back of the neck of the tackler with significant force should have been ruled on as foul play. The readings for Tizzano’s Smart mouthguard that measures impact force tells us that he received a “high-magnitude impact”.
Once again, player safety gets lip service.
Many TMO decisions on this tour have exposed that our system of on-field decision-making between the referee and the TMO continues to fail the game badly. We are asking our referees to sprint and run for several kilometres in a game, then we ask them to make match-defining decisions while they are highly fatigued. Last Saturday proved the system is not fit for purpose.
Rugby League empowers their TMOs to make an independent decision and then instruct the referee and the watching audience about the outcome. The system is not perfect but it is much faster and more accurate than rugby’s mess.
What Keenan’s try did do was deny Australian rugby the opportunity to host a dramatic decider in Sydney. In Melbourne, for the first time in decades, rugby in Australia was on the front pages and was the lead story on nightly news. The Wallabies and Lions dominated AFL and Rugby League across the media, something that has not happened for many years.
Regrettably, the reporting was mainly focused on the refereeing controversy and not the wonderful play that we witnessed from both sides. Sydney could have been a sensation.
Rugby in Australia just can’t seem to catch a break. Wallaby winger Harry Potter’s magic failed him as he pulled a hamstring with no replacement winger on the bench, while both Rob Valetini and Alan Alaalatoa sustained injures that forced them from the field and have ruled them out of the third Test.
Added to the emotional devastation of such a close loss, it all seems to have combined to deny Australia of any realistic chance of winning the third Test at the end of a week that could have, and should have, been a decider.
Despite the gloom, the reality is that over four halves of pulsating Test match rugby that have been played between these two teams, the Wallabies have won two of those halves.
If only rugby was that simple. The scoreboard says something completely different: 2-0 to the Lions.
With the Lions going with a 6-2 bench, they are looking to win scrum penalties as they did in the last quarter of the Melbourne match. Regrettably for the Wallabies, Saturday may see no change to the pattern of Lions victories across the tour.
