A day just like yesterday, but crazier
A Rugby World Cup weekend for the ages (PLUS: Dumbfounded in Delhi)
By the fires of St Christopher, that might well be the greatest weekend of rugby this planet has ever witnessed.
Hyperbole, much?
The two quarter-finals we hoped would be epics surpassed those wildly optimistic expectations, and the two quarters we suspected might be lower on quality were still outrageously interesting1.
It was incredible stuff and yet there is a slightly bitter aftertaste: others will no doubt feel differently, but neither semifinal moves the anticipatory needle a great deal.
A replay of the 2019 final would normally shape as a classic but somehow it feels like a booby prize (unless you’re English or South African, of course). The all-Rugby Championship semifinal between New Zealand and Argentina would not have been what organisers yearned for either but c’est la vie, all four teams have, in their own wildly varying ways, earned it.
The fourth quarter-final, won 29-28 by South Africa, will be remembered as a classic and, for the hosts, as celui qui est parti - the one that got away.
Whereas Ireland-NZ at times resembled two well-drilled heavyweights refusing to give an inch, South Africa-France was a wilder kind of brawl. The first half was super-loose, defying all established wisdom that knockout rugby is a game of reduction: reduce your errors, reduce your ambition, reduce the size of the field.
Instead, France started so fast and loose they sucked the Springboks into a similarly frenzied approach. They scored one try early and felt like Ben O’Keefe diddled them out of a second when giant lock Eben Etzebeth got in the passing lane close to the line and slapped the ball down, with the Kiwi ref tenuously ruling that he propelled it towards his own line.
“There are so many key moments. When you’re leading 7-0 and Etzebeth cuts off the ball. That was a strong moment for us and we weren’t able to finish off. Soon afterwards it was 7-7. Those are key moments…which add up. So many things went on,” coach Fabien Galthie said.
Said Antoine Dupont: “There were a few clear things where the whistle wasn’t blown. I don’t want to be a bad loser and moan about the refereeing but I’m not sure the level of refereeing was up to the level of the game today.”
(As an aside, the ‘deliberate knock on’ is not only one of the stupidest rules in all of sports, it was also applied in a laughably inconsistent manner this weekend. Look at the differences in application and outcomes for Etzebeth v Aaron Smith v Owen Farrell.)
After half an hour, both teams had posted three tries and France, who led 22-19 at the break, probably felt they’d left another one, possibly two, out there.
It was stunning rugby, but the slow-down was inevitable. The second half was a different sport, mostly because both teams were cooked.
It was more stop-start, sometimes cynically so2, but if possible, the elongated nature added to the scale and theatre of the occasion.
It was, in short, another exceptional match. Perhaps not as consistently high quality as yesterday’s but even more dramatic.
Some of France’s offloading and angles were sublime. They looked like the best pure rugby team at the tournament but they will bitterly regret conceding a couple of soft tries. If France was subjectively the best rugby side here, then South Africa again provided evidence they are the ultimate tournament beast.
Whatever it takes to win knockout matches, they will do it.
They won it all last time, but I think back to 2015 when they stayed in the semifinal against the All Blacks and had a golden chance to win it late even when it was patently obvious to everybody that New Zealand (who won 20-18) weren’t just the better team, but were playing better rugby.
They’re like mould spores on a bathroom ceiling; if you let them get established you can’t get rid of them, as France learned in Paris this morning.
The hosts played with 59 percent of the ball and a whooping territorial 63-37 advantage, forced the Boks into a scarcely believable 42 missed tackles and… still lost.
A couple of notables:
Antoine Dupont might be the best rugby player in the world and again received rave write-ups, but for all the bravery displayed in returning from a broken face, the second half wasn’t his best work. He got more scattergun as the game wore on and his decision-making and game management in the final quarter contributed to France’s downfall.
If Eben Etzebeth’s head clash with Uini Atonio had happened in pool play, would it have stayed yellow under review?
Probably not, but then again, the consistency around this ruling has never been there, bunker or no bunker. Must have been galling for the French (yes, terrible pun), that he scored a pivotal second-half try.
Cheslin Kolbe is a hell of a player and that conversion charge down to deny the disappointing Thomas Ramos was, ultimately, critical.
The best attacking player of the pitch might have been France hooker Peato Mauvaka, who made two clean breaks and beat five defenders - yes, he’s a front rower.
France’s decision to take three points with nine minutes to go was justifiable, but wrong. In that situation you have to ask yourself, what would South Africa want us to do? I’m pretty certain they would have wanted you to kick the three and then use the restart as a launching pad to pin you in your half for the next few minutes and force you to get desperate.
The North v South thing is complicated, and warrants more space than I can afford today.
***
Have to confess I missed the start - okay, I missed the entire first half - of England’s 30-24 win over Fiji, but unlike the later game, the second half was where most of the drama was stored.
The parallels between the first day of quarters and the second was freaky. The intensity and quality of the Paris quarters was off the charts, and while the daytime games in Marseille were clearly a notch down, they were also terrifically interesting.
When Fiji scored two tries in a matter of minutes to make it 24-all with 10 minutes to go, who really were sitting there thinking, “This could actually happen.”
Alas, England didn’t so much control the last 10 minutes as they did more things right than Fiji.
It’s been a strange tournament for both sides. Fiji have played really well against the big teams. They beat Australia, were one dropped pass from beating Wales and took England very deep. They were dreadful against the weaker teams though, struggling mightily to beat a limited Georgia team and losing against tournament darlings Portugal.
On the other hand, England started well, manhandling fellow semifinalist Argentina 27-10, but seemed to work on the law of diminishing returns, failing to win over their demanding press and pundits after an 18-17 dead-rubber win over Samoa.
But here they are. As the song sort of goes: “Nobody likes them but Steve Borthwick doesn’t care.”
“Many people wrote that we wouldn’t get out of the group,” said Borthwick. “Maybe some of them are here tonight. And it’s a team that performed very, very well to top the group. I don’t really care what other people think of us, I care about the development of the team.”
***
I did wonder whether Ian Foster was firing shots when he described Ireland’s attack as cut-and-paste. His assistant Scott McLeod claims not.
McLeod explained that Foster was referring to the relentlessness of those green attacking waves.
“It wasn’t a derogatory comment at all,” McLeod says. “Cut and paste meant they just kept running the same shape, the attack shape. And they just kept trying to find a weakness in us, over and over and over again.”
Hmmm, I’m not sure how cut-and-paste, cookie-cutter or any other phrase you choose to use to describe that moment can be labelled anything other than derogatory.
***
Rugby Pass’s Nick Bishop has pinpointed an area of New Zealand’s game that was essential to the outcome: the scrambling defence of the halves, Aaron Smith and Richie Mo’unga.
Scramble defence is one the biggest areas of growth or transformation. For example, it is what enables the Springboks to rush off the line with kamikaze intent, play-in, play-out. They know there will always be cover behind them. It was those unsung heroes in black, scrambling back to mop up the mess and pick up the pieces, who became true heroes in the course of a match where Ireland had more ball and created more chances.
Nobody performed better in this respect than the two New Zealand halves, Aaron Smith and Richie Mo’unga. There were any number of scenarios after a breach had been made, or where one threatened to be created, in which their interventions were understated but decisive.
It’s worth clicking on the link. He uses clips to demonstrate.
***
As is customary, Argentina’s progress deep into the tournament has gone largely unnoticed. They’re the Black Caps of World Rugby events in that way.
Even the rambunctious Michael Cheika’s attempts to summon outrage have fallen on deaf ears. But here it is anyway (and he does have a ‘minor’ point).
Much to Cheika’s annoyance, the organisers have refused to let his team travel up to the capital the day after the [Wales] match, because the hotel they are staying in is already being used by another of the teams based in Paris, and the rooms won’t open up until Monday.
“We asked them, we begged them, but they were too stubborn,” Cheika said. Instead, his team took the day off, and will travel on Monday, which means they will only have three full days to prepare for the game. “And the other team [NZ] will already be in Paris waiting for their semifinal.”
Cheika said it felt as though the tournament had been “made for the people in Paris” and drew a comparison with 2015, when his Australian team reached the final. “In 2015 we were playing in the same stadium, so it was easy to prepare,” he said. This time around Cheika “cannot implement the normal preparation phase in this short amount of time I have been given”. That, he said, “will have to change” for the 2027 tournament.
***
It was an interesting week for Sky TV on the news front, and they’re more than happy on the rugby front.
Meanwhile, in Delhi… this happened!
The astonishing weekend of World Cup rugby hasn’t left a lot of oxygen for anything else, but no worries because we all knew that Afghanistan would set the Cricket World Cup alight with a thumping victory over England.
Wait…
What the hell?!
The game in Delhi was electrifying from the start, with Afghani opener Rahmanullah Gurbaz (80 off 57) doing a faithful rendition of Bazball, or as Cricinfo’s Matt Roller labelled it, Gurbazball.
“My mindset was only one thing: just to be positive,” Gurbaz said. “I was really well prepared for that game - not only for that game, but for this competition. I was just trying to be positive against everyone.”
The minnows, playing in part to honour the victims of the earthquakes that have hit their country in the past week, lost their way a bit after Gurbaz was horrendously sold down the river by his skipper Hashmatullah Shahidi, but recovered to 284 thanks to a half century from Ikram Alikil, who was playing his third ODI in the past four years.
When England started losing wickets, the whole thing became like a fever dream as Afghanistan’s spinners - Mujeeb Ur Rahman (3 for 51), Mohammad Nabi (2-16) and Rashid Khan (3-37) - tied their vaunted opponents in knots.
The round-robin format gives teams plenty of wiggle-room, but what nobody anticipated was England and Australia, two of the self-styled Big Three, using up so much of their room this early.
It might be time to frame this table before Australia take on injury ravaged Sri Lanka in Lucknow tonight.
Afghanistan’s 69-run victory really is a massive boil over, one of the biggest in World Cup history (at least up there with England losing to Ireland in 2011).
It will also buoy them ahead of their next match against New Zealand, who, as discussed in a BYC special, will again be without Kane Williamson. The Black Caps will be hoping for a Chennai wicket like they got against Bangladesh, rather than the dustbowl that greeted India and Australia.
The flake in the sundae of this crazy few days was the NPC final going all-provincial, with Taranaki defeating Canterbury in their semifinal, and Hawke’s Bay accounting for Wellington.
Rugby needs to do a far better job of streamlining the substitution process: it was taking an interminable amount of time for players to get on and off the field. That should be an easy fix. More worrying for administrators, perhaps, is my suspicion that HIA process is being manipulated to act as an effective interchange bench.
I have so much admiration for Afghanistan cricket. Can you imagine the size of their budget vs the ECB? Rashid Khan is world class and this young opener Gurbaz could be special.
The ultimate minnow story.
As for the rugby, some great quarter finals has restored some of my faith in the game as a spectacle.
I still think the way the rules are structured we are going to see some serious referee intervention that will decide a game. I hope I'm wrong!
Great All Black performance but did Smith really have to put a box kick up with 2 minutes to go? If we are going to kick it in that scenario then surely as far as possible down the field is the way to go?
Interesting that Faf De Klerk kicked as well with 1 minute to go South Africa v France.
I agree with the 2nd footnote - did you spot that SA subbed Kolisi for a front rower, and then as front rowers were “injured” this permitted a substitution to bring a player back on to ensure scrums remain. It gave some of the loose forwards time to bench and catch their breath, then return for the final minutes of play.