Rugby World Cup final: Australia have reaped the rewards of exile repatriation

The way Eddie Jones tells it – and let’s face it, Eddie still tells a better tale than anyone else, even in the age of Michael Cheika – an international team boasting fewer than 700 caps in their starting line-up have about as much chance of winning a global title as Australia has of getting through a whole fortnight without a change of prime minister. It is a doctrine that gives the Wallabies hope ahead of today’s climactic meeting with the All Blacks. Seven hundred caps? Kids’ stuff. Try 830-odd instead.

Of course, the reigning southern hemisphere champions would not fit quite so snugly into the Jones world view – or rather, the Jones World Cup view – had Matt Giteau (101 international appearances and counting) and Drew Mitchell (69 Tests with power to add) not been summoned from exile in France and repatriated as fully fledged members of the green-and-gold gang. It is not quite accurate to say that Cheika, a super-sharp talker who may well turn out to be every bit as clever as his distant predecessor as Wallaby coach, put access to Giteau and Mitchell at the top of his list of non-negotiables during discussions with the Australian Rugby Union. He was far more insistent than that.

“Michael? He gets what he wants,” commented one Wallaby insider this week. “And it’s fair to say that Matt and Drew were what he wanted, pretty much more than anything as far as this World Cup was concerned. He really didn’t see the logic in denying himself the services of players that good, with that much experience of Test rugby and understanding of the realities of the game in Europe, just because they were playing offshore. Events have proved him right. They’ve made a massive contribution in pulling this squad together, and holding it together.”

All of which begs a fiendishly difficult question of England’s beleaguered coaching hierarchy, as if they don’t have enough answers to find already. Back in April, shortly after he had received official confirmation that he would be welcomed back into the Australian fold despite his long-term commitments with Toulon – and just before he won his club a third successive European crown by putting a blinding solo try past Clermont Auvergne at Twickenham – Mitchell could be heard arguing that Stuart Lancaster, the red-rose coach, might be wise to embrace his own exiles, rather than cut off his nose to spite his face.

“We’re in the same pool as England and it’s going to be pretty tough, so in some ways I hope they don’t pick Steffon Armitage,” said Mitchell, referring to his Toulon clubmate, a back-row forward of a specific type and one capable, in theory at least, of living with the Wallaby turnover specialists David Pocock and Michael Hooper at the tackle area. “It strikes me that England don’t have anyone who plays his style of rugby. He would really add some value to them if they selected him.”

If Lancaster was aware of the argument put forward by the man from the Sydney suburbs, he was not swayed by it. Armitage remained on the outside looking in as England were stripped bare on the floor by Pocock earlier this month and disappeared from their own World Cup as a consequence. By way of reinforcing the point, Giteau produced a midfield performance of high intelligence and exquisite subtlety before scoring a coffin-nail try at the death. Right now, Mitchell’s words sting like hell.

There were a number of reasons why Lancaster felt unable to urge a change of policy on his employers at the Rugby Football Union with a view to adding Armitage to his back-row roster, the most pressing of which may have been a fear of annoying some of his existing players. And it is true that certain senior forwards – the flankers Tom Wood and James Haskell, the hooker Tom Youngs, the No 8 Nick Easter – indicated in their own different ways that there might be a good deal of dissatisfaction sloshing around the red-rose camp if the goalposts were shifted at a late stage. As for the Wallabies, they see these things rather differently – hence the flexibility of their approach.

“We weren’t actually together in camp when the news came out about Matt and Drew,” said Scott Fardy, the blind-side specialist whose form in this tournament has pushed him squarely into the spotlight initially reserved for Pocock and Hooper. “I’d also played a fair bit of rugby outside of Australia and I didn’t have a clue whether or not I’d be involved.

“I don’t think any of us had any kind of problem with them coming back from France. For one thing, they’d already made a great contribution to the Wallabies; for another, the idea of blokes going abroad to experience something new and do something different with their lives is pretty cool.”

If there have been few players in this tournament cooler than Giteau and Mitchell, both of whom play a free-spirited brand of creative rugby that lifts the union code towards “beautiful game” status, it is safe to say that none have sacrificed more in pursuit of a winner’s medal. If reports in Australia are accurate, they have cost themselves small fortunes – around £185,000 between them – by taking leave of absence from Toulon.

Far from showing even the slightest resentment at the fact that Giteau and Mitchell can afford to make such a call on their own finances, the home-based Wallabies celebrate the fact that a couple of union emigres have found a way back into Test rugby. In fact, the term “Giteau’s Law” is seen as a wholly positive addition to the Australian rugby lexicon. What is more, the likes of Adam Ashley-Cooper and Will Genia, who start today’s final at right wing and scrum-half respectively, will head for France in the coming days secure in the knowledge that if Cheika feels he needs them for the 2016 Rugby Championship, there is nothing to stop him picking them.

There is not even the beginnings of an argument over the success of the regulation change from the Wallaby perspective. Mitchell’s influence has grown as the tournament has unfolded, and there have been significant contributions from the two locks, Kane Douglas and Dean Mumm, who were fast-tracked into the set-up after cutting short their stays in Europe and re-signing for tours of Super Rugby duty.

But the killer element, the deal-breaker, has been the 33-year-old Sydneysider in the trademark headgear. As Justin Marshall, the long-serving All Black half-back who lost a World Cup semi-final to the Wallabies in 2003, remarked this week: “Giteau was struggling with the pace of the game when he first came back into Test rugby, but he’s adapted and he’s looking increasingly dangerous. He’s working in sync with the first five-eighth Bernard Foley and that’s made Foley a different player.

“In fact, Foley is in the form of his life, playing with confidence on the gain line because he knows he has a distributor outside him. The All Blacks haven’t seen Giteau play like this: in Sydney earlier this year he was reasonably easy to contain, but that has changed. I can see him asking some questions.”

When Marshall suffered the peculiar kind of pain only an Antipodean can feel on that excruciating night in Sydney a dozen years ago, Giteau was still a fringe Wallaby and not on the field, although he made regular appearances the following week, when Australia met England in the final and he was required as an on-and-off replacement for the wounded Stephen Larkham.

It has been a long and frequently rocky road from there to here, but he is the main man now. All his nation needs from him this afternoon is a breath of fresh brilliance.