Ryan Lonergan doesn’t mind chipping away on a long-term project. Take the 1974 HQ Holden gathering dust in a shed on the family farm in Williamsdale, south of Canberra.
Lonergan bought the car as a 16-year-old, with the plan to do it up and drive it to his school formal. When that deadline came and went, the Wallabies halfback changed it to the formal of his younger brother, Lachlan.
“No chance,” Ryan says. “It’s still sitting in the shed. It runs … just.
“But unfortunately, it is a bit on the backburner. I get a lot of stick for it just sitting in the shed, particularly from my brother.
“I’ve pretty much finished all the work; I’ve done it all myself so it’s not tip-top or anything, but yeah, I’ll finish it off eventually. We’ll get there.”
For the record, Ryan is now 28 and Lachlan is 26. Since those teenage days, the brothers have gone on to become Brumbies and Wallabies.
But the fact that Lachlan, a hooker, played for the ACT three years after his brother, but then made his debut for Australia five full years before him points to the other long-term project in Ryan’s life: becoming a Wallaby.
That mission, thankfully, has been more successful than getting the Holden back on the road. But for a long time it felt just as elusive for Lonergan, who endured the longest apprenticeship of any Australian player in the Super Rugby era – 93 games over nine seasons – before making his Wallabies debut last year. The only other players even close, Jed Holloway and Sam Talakai, were in the 70-game range.
“I’d probably rather it not be my story, but I do think it’s a good way to do it,” Lonergan says. “I think it teaches you a bit of resilience. And then, when you’re here, I feel I’m ready.”
Lonergan made his debut for the Brumbies in 2017, having played for Australian Schoolboys in 2016 and then captained the Junior Wallabies. Nothing out of the ordinary so far for a rising star. But unlike others in the cohort who then pushed up to national honours, Lonergan had to settle in for a long wait. A very long wait.
He became a key player and captained the Brumbies in many successful seasons. But, further up, the Wallabies halfback trio of Jake Gordon, Nic White and Tate McDermott was rusted on. Issak Fines-Leleiwasa even leap-frogged Lonergan for the gig in 2023.
Before long, Lonergan was owner of the unwanted tag: “Australia’s best player without a Test cap”.
“I just tried to keep chipping away, really,” Lonergan said. “I saw a lot of people, and they fly through it all. They’ll debut in Super Rugby, and then they debut for the Wallabies the same year or whatever. And sometimes it goes really well, sometimes it doesn’t. So you see both sides of it.
“It didn’t really bother me too much. I’ve thought I’ve just got to keep getting better. Maybe more recently, it probably started to annoy me a little bit more, because I thought I was more ready. But early on in those days, I would be in a camp, and I was thinking, ‘Oh jeez, actually, I’m still probably not quite ready’.
“In the last couple of years, yeah, I was starting to get a little bit more frustrated, because I’m a bit of a realist and I felt I was ready, and I kept missing out. But again, I just kept chipping away.”
Lonergan’s saintly patience eventually paid off. When White retired last year, he became Wallaby No.993 at Eden Park against the All Blacks.
“My old man’s always been a big believer in just keep working hard and good things will come,” Lonergan said.
It’s fair to say good things came for the Wallabies as much as they did for Lonergan. For many Australian players in the modern game, waiting nine seasons for a Test jersey would be five seasons too long. Many would have seen a closed door and gone overseas long ago.
“It crossed my mind [to go overseas], but I also thought I was just on the point of, right, now I’m ready, so I felt I would have been doing myself an injustice if I was to work that hard and then just give up on it,” he said.
Lonergan entered Test rugby as an experienced, game-controlling halfback and barely blinked. At 27, he knew his game perfectly, and after Gordon suffered a season-ending injury in May, Lonergan moved into the Wallabies team in July.
In all three July Tests, he was one of the best players in gold. And in a sign of his influence, the Wallabies were mostly on top when Lonergan was on the field, but fell away when he was replaced.
In 33 minutes (before injury) against Ireland and 58-minute stints against France and Italy, the Wallabies had a combined score of 70-46. With Lonergan off the paddock, the Wallabies were collectively outscored 29-24.
Using the plus-minus stat common in basketball, the Wallabies are plus 24 with Lonergan and minus five without him. It’s not all on bench halfback McDermott, of course, given the team undergoes multiple changes in the last half hour of matches.
But there was no mistaking the overall shifts in fluency and momentum.
“I’m happy with where my game’s at. It’s not complete though, so I’ll just try to keep dragging that same mindset through and keep trying to get better,” Lonergan says. “It took me a long time to get here, so I guess I’m just grateful for it to be happening.
“I could have thrown the toys out of the cot and said I was good enough when I wasn’t, but then I’d just stay the player I was. I just kept chipping away. You get better if you’re willing to keep putting in work.“
The Lonergan work ethic comes from mum Jenny and dad Tom, who is a builder and a farmer on the 600-acre cattle and sheep property where the boys grew up doing chores and kicking at homemade footy posts.
The brothers still love nothing more than chipping in and doing some fencing.
“Whether I recognised it or not when I was younger, it really rubbed off on us,” Lonergan says. “Growing up on a farm taught us a work ethic. And then, don’t complain too much, just get on with it. It’s worked pretty well so far.”
Iain Payten is a senior sports reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.
