Get that up yer, Eddie.
The Wallaby win over Japan in Osaka was satisfying on a dozen levels at once.
Most importantly, of course, is the fact that it was indeed a WIN, a victory if not a triumph, but that rarest of breed in recent times, a (W) next to the Wallaby name on the scoring ledger as the final whistle blew. And it was terrific that it came in the first match of new Wallaby coach Les Kiss’s tenure.
But right up there in terms of satisfaction was that it was against a side coached by Eddie Jones, who in fact was negotiating to take that very position while having carriage of the Australian team in the 2023 World Cup. The result was that our side was a complete shambles, and he left behind the smoking ruins of what might have been.
But here, three years later, our blokes registered a small payback against a Japanese side good enough to have easily defeated Italy and even threatened Ireland in recent times.
The win to the Goodies, came despite several things not going the Wallabies’ way. The first thing was playing in such heat and humidity; it was clear from the first that in terms of sheer energy expended, not to mention hugely skilful play, the habituated locals were always going to be a handful. We were also a man down for twenty minutes – following lock Miles Amatosero being dispatched for high contact – which exhausted the surviving fourteen further.
And finally, we had an error rate that would kill a brown dog. Balls were kicked out on the full, knocked on and dropped behind with alarming regularity, even while the Japanese kicks were twice allowed to bounce and we kept making mistakes just when the try-line beckoned.
Against that?
Well, against that both our scrum and lineouts were excellent, and the surviving lock, Josh Canham – sort of rhymes with CANNON – turned in a near Man of the Match performance, stealing balls in the lineout, winning his own, ripping the balls off them in the maul, and constantly penetrating their line with death-or-glory charges. In the back row, Fraser McReight had his usual strong game while, off the bench, Taniela Tupou scored a great try which – if I were him – I’d describe as “a 50-metre carry, sidestepping my way through,” but was closer to a five-centimetre carry, followed by falling over the line with the ball in hand. The point was, after marvellous lead-up work by the entire team, it was Tupou who was there at the death to finish the job against a valiant Cherry Blossoms team that simply refused to quit. It was also Tupou who pulled off a massive tackle in the final seconds, making his opponent spill the ball, which finally put the game to rest.
Angus Bell also had a great game off the bench, as did Jeremy Williams, and in some ways Kiss’s bench might have been stronger than the starting side they replaced, which saw the Wallabies finish strongly and not fade badly, which they have also been wont to do in recent times.
In our back-line we saw the virtues of new coach Les Kiss’s stated desire to have less structured play, to have his charges work less with zones and channels and more with – stop me if this is too complex – running to where the bloody gaps are!
Time and again they did that, led by Max Jorgensen, and the results were there for all to see. The diminutive winger – and Tom Wright at fullback – were standouts for us, while the other winger Harry Potter had another strong game, as did Ryan Lonergan at halfback. When Tate McDermott came on to replace him at half in the final twenty minutes, he did what he does best, launching a series of darting runs from the base of the scrums, rucks and mauls and always laying the ball back.
At fly-half, Declan Meredith struggled, and it was frankly a surprise that he played the full eighty minutes, as hard as he did try. (Carter Gordon, who was a revelation against Ireland last month, before injuring himself, will likely be back next week, in the return bout against Japan in Townsville.) Joseph Suaalii also struggled at times to hold on to the ball, though as captain Harry Wilson noted at game’s end, in those conditions the ball was like soap.
Whatever. It was a WIN, did I mention? And not only that, the Wallabies second in succession!
Get that up yer, Eddie.
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Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X.
