Just when he needs to convince the Wallabies this is the game of their lives, Joe Schmidt couches his cri de coeur in the language of a faceless business seminar. Never mind death or glory, he depicts a decisive second Test against the British and Irish Lions – poised to attract the largest crowd in Australian rugby history – as a moment for “growth” and “learnings”. He conveys no sense of this being a once-in-every-12-years event, instead characterising this grandest of occasions at the Melbourne Cricket Ground as a chance to watch his players “develop”. But is this not the very moment they should be developing towards, the type of match that for the vast majority will only come once in their careers?
Emotion is seldom a feature of the Schmidt repertoire. He is a pragmatist, a problem-solver, instilling such exhaustive attention to detail in the minds of his former Ireland charges that Andrew Porter, now the Lions prop, would find himself counting the speed bumps while driving to training. Even so, it is maddening to see him treating this do-or-die contest with such detachment.
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A sense with this Wallabies squad is that they have failed to treat this series with the reverence it deserves. How could Schmidt, supposedly a meticulous planner, have agreed to a preparation programme so thin that it involved one warm-up game against Fiji? How significant a factor was this in a first-half performance in Brisbane that even he described as “submissive”?
Melbourne offers him a chance to change the record, to rekindle the fire from the spluttering embers of Australian rugby. While his selections are more promising, with the restoration of Will Skelton and Rob Valetini bringing priceless extra forward thrust, the rhetoric is still far too flat.
If you close your eyes listening to Schmidt, you could be forgiven for thinking this Test is no more significant to him than next month’s two against South Africa in the Rugby Championship. “We’ve got a group of players who haven’t won too much in recent times,” he says. “So, I think building confidence is an incremental thing.”
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This is hardly the time for a Wallabies head coach to be talking about piecemeal progress. The code of union in Australia is at one minute to midnight, its presence in the national consciousness eclipsed by the twin behemoths of Australian Rules and National Rugby League. Despite being one of the world’s great sporting destinations, Melbourne saw its resident team, the Rebels, shut down last year with over £11 million in unpaid debt. It is testament to Melburnians’ appetite to share in such a rare spectacle that a gate of over 90,000 is still expected at the MCG for the Lions’ visit. You wonder, though, if the men in green-and-gold grasp this scarcity value in quite the same way.
“Are we going to do anything extra? No,” says full-back Tom Wright, asked if this match carried additional meaning. “We have just got to be better at what we’ve tried to do. It’s a little bit of a vanilla answer to your question, but that’s just the reality for us. It’s a cool event, but it’s moment by moment.”
Schmidt would have struggled to put it better himself. Under his leadership, the Wallabies are heading into this defining duel so preoccupied with tactical minutiae that they appear oblivious to the wider context.
It is a pity, in many ways. You want to see what this Test means in the whites of Schmidt’s eyes. After all, if he cannot summon the passion, what chance do his players have? Part of the problem is that he already knows he is leaving. The precise date keeps shifting: initially the hope was that he would preside over the World Cup in Australia in 2027, only for him to announce he would be stepping down earlier for family reasons. While the Kiwi, just the third non-Australian to inhabit this role in 63 years, has since extended until mid-2026, his attachment to the role is tempered by the fact he is halfway out of the door. It looks, in a series imbued with such heritage and mystique, like a loveless marriage.
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Although Schmidt falls short as a great orator, one area where he has drawn almost universal admiration is his tactics. Johnny Sexton has praised him for leaving an “unbelievable mark” on rugby in Ireland, during a six-year reign that encompassed three Six Nations titles and the country’s first victories over New Zealand. Mark Telea, who thrived under his direction with the All Blacks, reflects: “It’s his attention to detail – he has got the smarts.” And yet should Australia slide to an irretrievable 2-0 deficit here in Melbourne, this idea will undergo some serious revision, with a view forming that Schmidt has bungled several crucial calls.
Ian Madigan, the retired Ireland fly-half, has spoken of Schmidt having a “blueprint”, claiming he will have “prepped his players to within an inch of their lives”. This might be so, but there were few signs of this in Australia’s hapless handling of the first Test, where for 40 minutes they froze like deer in headlights, toiling to produce any front-foot ball. Was it the mark of a strategic genius that he deployed a half-back partnership in Brisbane, in Tom Lynagh and Jake Gordon, who had never played with each other? Is he truly fielding the best side available to him in Brisbane when Taniela Tupou and Lukhan Salakaia-Loto, both destructive performers for the First Nations and Pasifika XV, are omitted? Or when a veteran of the versatility of James O’Connor is deemed surplus to requirements? You want to believe, given Schmidt’s body of work, that there is a master plan. But his shortcomings against the Lions have left his reputation as a tactical wizard hanging by a thread.
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