Wales vs Australia: Can Wales end the Aussie Six Nations hoodoo?

Dark mutterings and veiled threats in the club-versus-country row, simmering anger over information leaked from the team room, another ruthless head-hunting triumph for the euro-rich French, pleadings of poverty from everyone else… my, what a cheery world we live in. And the worst of it is that this evening’s concluding autumn international between Wales and Australia is fully deserving of its miserable build-up. The match should not have been sanctioned in the first place.

This is merely the latest fixture at the Millennium Stadium to fall outside the International Rugby Board’s “Test window”, and while the beleaguered governing body shows no sign of understanding that a non-closing window is nothing more than a bloody great hole, there are a lot of union folk out there – players, coaches, investors, sponsors, broadcasters – who are growing increasingly exasperated by these annual add-ons.

The Welsh Rugby Union will say it needs the cash. So too the Australians, who are implementing salary cuts for players at the top level. Even the mighty All Blacks “show for dough” at this time of year and have been known to demand seven-figure sums in an effort to keep the wolf from the door. But the sport is not made of money and there will have to be a reality check sooner or later. As one seasoned chronicler of the union code has been known to lament: “So they want more dosh? I’d like to marry Helen Mirren, but it’s not going to happen.”

Yet we plough on for the time being, and while there are more sightings of the Wallabies these days than there are episodes of MasterChef, today’s game will at least provide an accurate measure of the balance of rugby power between the northern and southern hemispheres as the build-up to the next World Cup moves up a notch. Should the tourists do enough to retain third place in the official rankings behind New Zealand and South Africa, the message they send out will be loud and clear.

Certainly, a Wallaby victory will hurt Wales badly, and as the Six Nations champions are indisputably the best side in Europe on a good day, the pain will be felt more widely – especially as the All Blacks and the Springboks have already blazed their way across the continent without suffering a single defeat between them. It may also leave the Red Dragonhood wondering if they will ever beat Australia again.

In the summer of last year, Wales lost all three Tests on their tour Down Under by the ridiculously small aggregate margin of 11 points. A little over four months later in Cardiff, they finished second again – to a try at the last knockings from Kurtley Beale, deep in overtime. “It’s probably the hardest defeat I’ve ever had to take,” said Sam Warburton, the home captain, who has been taught many a tough lesson at the school of hard knocks.

Along with many of those who stand alongside him this evening, Warburton now knows what it is to prevail over the men in green and gold – albeit in Lions red, as opposed to the Welsh shade. But the flanker knows that if he and his brethren are to be competitive at the global gathering in 2015, where they will have to beat either Australia or England (possibly both) just to make it to the knockout stage, Wales must find a way of matching the ruthlessness of the Lions without help from a Tommy Bowe or a Jonathan Sexton, an Alex Corbisiero or a Sean O’Brien.

It is ruthlessness that separates the south from the north right now – that and the combination of composure and iron will that makes the Wallabies so dangerous in the closing stages of a tight Test and gives the All Blacks the wherewithal to win matches any other side in the world would surely lose, as they famously did in Dublin six days ago.

Wales have plenty of players who offer what international coaches call “points of difference”, from Alex Cuthbert and George North on the wings to Dan Lydiate and Toby Faletau in the back row. What they rarely show is the merciless instinct of the cold-eyed killer. Unless, of course, they are facing England.

Alun Wyn Jones, among the most articulate of international second-row forwards as well as one of the most accomplished, acknowledged as much a couple of days ago. “We’re perfectly capable of beating the Wallabies, so to have lost so narrowly to them on so many occasions… it’s frustrating, if not maddening,” he said. “When you look at the reasons why, you realise that at the highest level it’s the little things you don’t do that cost you the victory. I suppose you can put it into the category of ‘game management’. Whether it’s chasing a game, as the All Blacks did in Ireland last week, or closing out a game, which is the situation we’ve found ourselves in on a number of occasions, the big southern hemisphere teams are good at it. Certainly, the New Zealanders have developed a habit of maintaining composure under pressure. The Irish did everything they could have done to win last week’s match – after receiving a lot of criticism for their performance against Australia, they responded by playing with real intensity – but you just knew at the end that if the All Blacks kept the ball, they’d score.

“It’s something we need to work on: we felt we should have won at least three of those last four games with the Wallabies, but the scoreboard told us we didn’t. You only learn how to play with the necessary composure at the important moments by continuing to take on the top sides in the world, by continuing to put yourselves under that pressure. The only way to do it is to do it.”

Jones’ fellow Osprey, the outside-half Dan Biggar, admires the “swagger” of southern hemisphere rugby, but also recognises that when they are under serious heat, the two Antipodean sides in particular take the shortest route from A to B – which is not always the most adventurous or imaginative one. “What strikes me is that they don’t try to do too much with the ball in those pressure situations,” he said. “They play with a lot of confidence, yes, but also with a lot of discipline. It’s somewhere we have to get to if we want to fulfil our potential. A big focus for us at the moment is on not overplaying.”

In the Welsh camp, there is a strong sense that the gap between north and south is narrowing. But numbers are numbers and facts are facts: the five-year win rate of the Six Nations teams against the three Sanzar countries is a paltry 14 per cent. It is lower still when you remove France from the European side of the equation.

Maybe Jones is right: maybe Wales’ chances of maximising their chances of beating the crème de la crème of the southern hemisphere nations on a regular basis is to play them as regularly as possible. Jack Rowell, the coach who masterminded Bath’s long dominance of European club rugby, certainly took the “more is more” approach when he managed England in the mid-1990s, and the World Cup triumph in 2003 proved he had been on to something.

But familiarity on the present scale cuts both ways. Australia are the cleverest rugby side around: how else to explain their competitiveness at a time of comparative weakness? Whatever Wales have learnt about the Wallabies over the recent rush of fixtures, it is safe to assume that the Wallabies have learnt every bit as much about Wales. It will be no surprise if today’s curtain-down match is as tight as a drum… and no one will die of shock if it turns out that the tourists know a little too much for their hosts.