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Wayne Smith, Hong Kong | November 03, 2008
JUST before kick-off at Hong Kong Stadium on Saturday, two dragons, one black, one gold, stalked on to the playing surface and presented themselves to the respective presidents of the New Zealand and Australian rugby unions.
How the dragons found their way to Andy Leslie and Paul McLean is difficult to say because at that point they didn't have any eyes. But in keeping with Chinese tradition, the two presidents inked them in to bring good luck to their teams. Former All Blacks captain Leslie evidently did the better job. McLean might have dotted the eyes but clearly he forgot to cross the Ts.
In the end, it was the little things that brought the Wallabies undone. Certainly, as coach Robbie Deans admitted afterwards, they were more deserving of victory this time than they were in BledisloeIII in Brisbane on September 13, but in the end clearly not quite deserving enough.
The 50-50 calls didn't go their way. One day they will and that day is not too far away judging by the contributions of youngsters Richard Brown, Dean Mumm, Luke Burgess and Drew Mitchell, but it's not here yet.
Luck ebbs and flows in this great trans-Tasman affair called the Bledisloe Cup. Remember all those squeaky wins that fell the Wallabies' way just a few years back, the 27-23, 19-14, 24-23, 29-26, 16-14 scorelines that Australians gleefully accepted with barely a backward glance. New Zealanders, meanwhile, gnashed their teeth at squandered chances and called down from heaven a plague on all those referees who dudded them at the last minute.
That's where the Wallabies and their supporters are today.
"Fans cry foul as ref takes the wind out of Wallabies' sails," shouted the headline in the Sunday Morning Post. But while the general tone of the attached article was sympathetic, there was also the chastening observation that whingeing Aussies are becoming more plentiful than whingeing Poms.
The refereeing of Irishman Alan Lewis might have been a travesty or, worse, a harbinger of what is still to come in the remaining five tour matches in Europe, but ultimately that's out of the Wallabies' control.
Publicly, they accepted the referee's decisions. Privately, they were fuming at them, and not just about Lewis's lack of consistency but also at the fact he appeared to go into the Test with outdated and preconceived ideas the Australian scrum was still the pushover it was a few years ago.
This was, after all, the same referee who pinged England prop Julian White with the words "don't try to milk a penalty" after a scrum collapse in a Cook Cup Test in June 2006. Which, of course, is code for, "We both know the Australian scrum is hopeless but don't try to make it look worse than it is".
Times change. So do players. The Al Baxter that Lewis penalised for collapsing in the 11th minute on Saturday to present Dan Carter and the All Blacks with their first three-point gift isn't the dud scrummager he was two years ago, let alone the sacrificial lamb slaughtered by England at Twickenham in 2005.
But Lewis apparently is not quite up with that news and when he did what all referees do when scrums collapse, guessed - and his best guess was Baxter was to blame.
Perhaps had the same thing happened later in proceedings, after dozens of players had lost their footing on the slippery surface, he might have guessed otherwise and re-set the scrum, but someone had to be made an example of and Baxter had form.
The pity was that laying the heavy hand of a northern hemisphere referee on a Bledisloe Cup match was almost inviting a ruined spectacle. What makes trans-Tasman Tests the best shows in world rugby is that both sides play to win, backing their own ability to beat the other.
That's almost a foreign concept on the northern side of the equator where so many teams play in a way designed to stop their opposition from playing. It's a mindset that almost invites the referee to become the lead actor - and most referees don't need to be asked twice.
But the 39,682 spectators who made the journey to So Kon Po on Saturday, some 6000 of them having travelled from Australia and New Zealand, hadn't come to watch Lewis's soliloquy.
That's why the boos came from all sections of the crowd, black, gold and neutral while he was holding centre stage.
The historic occasion demanded more. The pity was that while Hong Kong itself did everything it could, even down to the rain holding off, the match itself fell just a little flat.
Which brings us to the old chestnut of the experimental laws. The game was played under the rules now in force in the northern hemisphere, namely with some of the new laws in place but with the old sanctions overlaying them. So when Lewis awarded seven straight penalties to the All Blacks, three of which Carter converted into points, that was the new, old sanctions in operation. Or was it the old, new sanctions?
Whatever. Five weeks ago when these two sides last met in BledisloeIII, most if not all of those long-arm penalties would have been short-arm free-kicks, resulting in a tap-and-go or scrums - not shots at goal, penalties far worse than the crimes.
Small wonder the Wallabies felt this was a much slower Test than the one played in Brisbane on September 13.
It's a total mess, this experiment with the new laws, which is precisely what its opponents in Britain want.
Muddy the waters sufficiently, create the utterly bizarre situation where three different sets of laws apply at different times and places and eventually it seems like common sense to ditch the lot of them and go back to that stifling set of laws that helped England make it through to the World Cup final last year.
It's a test of patience for those who want to see the game made more attractive. Which is not to say the laws that applied throughout the Tri-Nations this year were perfect. But remember the "E" stands for "experimental" and what doesn't work can be jettisoned. That said, playing a new set of laws under an old set of penalties is asking for trouble.
And that's precisely what the Wallabies got on Saturday. Trouble. One of the Ts McLean forgot to cross.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...015651,00.html
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