Rugby: Some truth from Aussies at last

Australia's coach Ewen McKenzie only this week used spurious statistics regarding Quade Cooper. Photo / AP

So much spin flies out of Australian rugby, and particularly New South Wales, that it was a nice shock to hear something resembling reality emerge this week.

The news isn't nice. It's not even good for New Zealand rugby, which benefits from a strong transtasman rivalry. But at least this is genuine, which is a good starting point for Australian rugby if it is to get the kiss of life in a very competitive football market.

Australian rugby is in a financial hole. Endlessly poor results have ripped the guts out of a code that used to punch above its weight to dominate the All Blacks for a time, win two World Cups and produce many of the best backs in rugby history.

At the risk of adding to the hyperbole, a brilliant new generation of footballers - many of Polynesian origin - can drive Australian rugby back to the top. But if the shambles continue, they will go to waste.

Australian rugby has lost a staggering $19 million in the past two years, and support for the sport has slumped. The Wallabies and head office will feel the effects - via pay cuts - as will the rest of the game. Nick Farr-Jones, the great Wallaby halfback, didn't exactly help the situation with the populist call to put the test players on incentive-based pay schemes. Like that addresses the real problems and would solve anything, or help harmony in the test camp.

Results on the field are affecting those off it badly, although you wouldn't know by the cheery news reports that dot the Australian rugby landscape.

This week, Wallaby coach Ewen McKenzie used spurious statistics to bolster Quade Cooper's defensive abilities. Maybe it was the way his comments were reported, but it was a load of nonsense. Statistics help assess footballers, but aren't the whole deal. One man's tackle is another man's turnstile.

"Quade's tackling at 78 per cent ...", was kind of funny and kind of sad. It inspired the immortal headline "Cooper better tackler than McCaw: Aussies".

It was not hard to find other examples. Mid-September brought the headline "NSW Waratahs announce squad for 2014 and target top two finish", with the story intro proclaiming that a "forklift driver from Flemington Markets" was the player who would help create this turnaround.

The Waratahs finished ninth last season, have never won the Super title, and on average finish seventh. Suddenly, a forklift driver will lift these cabbages into the top two.

Apart from keeping their mouths shut, it's difficult to know what the Aussie rugby mob should say if they can't be honest.

The modern media environment of digital tape recorders and constant demands for quotes produces strange results. But reality has taken a fair old kicking.

Two recent headlines. "McKenzie: Quade Cooper can fire against ABs". Can, will, might ... using predictions as a way of getting positive spin, again. And then ... "Wallabies unleash attacking style against Argentina but Ewen McKenzie says there's more to come". More of the same.

There was a familiar ring to this particular story intro: "Ewen McKenzie says the seven-try Rosario rout against Argentina was 'only just scratching around the edges' of the full attacking potential of the new Wallabies." Blah, blah, blah.

It's all happy-clappy prediction stuff while Rome has been burning. Australian rugby used to be the smartest, now it plays everyone else for being stupid. The Australian sporting public and rugby's backers aren't fooled, however. Mouths may be flapping, but wallets are closing.

McKenzie again after another towelling: "I've been around the rugby scene for a long time. If you look at a lot of results, you'll see 70-point turnarounds in seven days." All faithfully reported of course. But wait, there's more (and far more than fits here). In August, the Wallabies' set-piece coach Andrew Blades indicated new laws emphasising technique would prove the saviour for a notoriously weak scrum. Had to giggle at that one.

As one of those technically superior frontrowers Ben Alexander admitted this very week, the Wallaby scrum won't "silence our critics until we perform well in a big game".

Even then, Alexander was undaunted.

The Wallaby scrum was "trending well" - now that's a trendy phrase. And using more statistical gymnastics, the Wallaby scrum matched the mighty Argentinians thanks to Alexander deleting "about three or four scrums in that second half where we let them get ascendancy" from the assessment.

This kind of sports language and reporting isn't confined to Australian rugby of course, but the sheer scale of it in their case, when matched against actual results, is in a league of its own.

All Blacks coach Steve Hansen was only partly right when, after Australia's big win over Argentina, he reckoned "you don't have to give an Aussie too much of an injection for his confidence to start coming out of his mouth".

Australia's forced rugby confidence pours forth under any circumstances.

Adding two Super 15 teams over-stretched the playing resources, created a weak conference and diluted the traditional rivalries that once fuelled the Wallabies' success. The general Aussie sporting public, brought up on the open nature of league, Aussie Rules and soccer, doesn't take easily to the mysteries of a sport mired in rucks, mauls and collapsed scrums when the national team turns into losers.

The current Wallaby squad contains too many trundlers.

Australian rugby can't talk its way out of those issues, and the blather contributes to the job not getting done.

Finally, in late 2013, we got a realistic rugby headline.

"Wallabies ready to take pay cuts to save the game."