Un-Australian, tepid and toothless. Wallabies slammed over first Test performance

The Age

15 hours ago

The sound in Brisbane was not of rage or rancour, merely one of bleak, sullen resignation. On a galling evening for the Wallabies, this stadium, traditionally such a cauldron for the hosts, felt more like a mausoleum, with home fans' despair at their team's inadequacies so all-engulfing that the hype man had to plead with them to 'make some noise'.
After a 12-year wait for their players to collide with the British and Irish Lions once more, they had dared to expect some snarl and defiance befitting the occasion. But instead they witnessed a glaring mismatch, with the lack of cohesion on the pitch so painful that rare incursions into the tourists' 22 were greeted with bitterly ironic cheers.
All told, the shift in atmosphere had taken just 42 minutes, with Dan Sheehan punishing an errant Australian line-out to put the Lions out of sight. At kick-off the scene on Caxton Street, on the approach to Suncorp Stadium, had been magnificent, with the seething convergence of red shirts an encapsulation of everything a Lions Test should be.
The series opener would soon curdle, though, into a grisly reckoning for Australia, whose status as the sixth-best team in the world looked flattering in the face of the Lions' bombardment and eventual 27-19 win. While their deficiencies had been well-documented, surely they would channel some snarl, some quintessential Queensland defiance, in a city that demanded it?
In all honesty, the fight materialised far too late. Australia were tepid, toothless, their only highlight coming courtesy of an inspired individual flourish from Max Jorgensen, stripping the ball from Hugo Keenan for a try against the run of play.
Even Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii, whose prodigious athleticism had been heralded as a game-changing factor, was anonymous for long periods. Save for an improbable late riposte, they were inferior in all departments, so traumatised by early brilliance from the Lions' all-Scottish midfield of Finn Russell, Sione Tuipolutu and Huw Jones that they could not conjure any decisive response. Their salvaging of some respectability in the scoreline, with a late try limiting the Lions' margin of victory to eight points, painted a misleading picture of this Test, in which there was not so much a gulf in class as a chasm.
For all that captain Harry Wilson had been galvanised by a pep talk from one of his predecessors, the World Cup-winning John Eales, Australia were a pale imitation of the great Wallabies sides. Where Eales is celebrated as the mastermind of that memorable series triumph in 2001, Joe Schmidt's side will require a miracle to achieve anything comparable.
For large swathes of this game their performance was, quite simply, un-Australian, bereft of ferocity or any apparent belief they could win. It was not just their lack of ingenuity or tendency to kick far too often in an abject first half, but their actions at the end, when they booted the ball out of play as if congratulating themselves on a bonus-point loss. How odd, too, to see them mingling happily with the Lions at the final whistle, simply relieved that they had not suffered a humiliation. So much for the notion of a defeat, any defeat, eating away at the true Australian's soul.