Winning is always important but when you are literally playing for your future and even when success doesn’t guarantee the doors will stay open resilience can sometimes overwrite skill to get the job done.
Unfortunately for the Melbourne Rebels all the fortitude in the world wasn’t enough to overcome the Brumbies in the opening match of what could be their final season, failing to score a try in a 30-3 defeat in front of a mostly empty stadium only opened to them after one of the club’s many debts was repaid this week.
The Rebels are playing a bit like the walking dead this season, their coach and his staff on four-month contracts, players on massive deals up to $500,000 secure they’ll get paid, but heads on a swivel for the next possible opportunity, needing only to look around the empty administration offices at AAMI Park to know things aren’t good.
Those players fronted up on Friday night, the club’s dirty laundry well and truly aired, $22 million in debts, bailouts being hunted, against a team they’d lost seven of their last eight matches against.
While the drums are starting to beat about the Brumbies too, arguably the most successful Australian Super Rugby franchise ever, or at least the most consistently successful, that the issues of being an “ongoing concern” are rea for them as well, their capacity for winning remains undiminished.
Before the match Rebels prop Matt Gibbon, who knows a thing or two about overcoming adversity given his childhood experiences, said he had his teammates were “hissing” they were that excited to play.
“If we start winning people will stop talking,” he told the host broadcaster.
“They can’t take anything else away from us, we’re ready to go.”
When the scoreline read 7-0 in favour of the Brumbies after just four minutes, then 14-0 after 14, after two tries to Brumbies winger Corey Toole, the air was sucked out of the home team who were down 17-3 at halftime and never recovered in front of a crowd estimated at around 4000.
Murphy’s Law states that everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and when Rebels five-eighth Carter Gordon, a Wallaby, a World Cup starter, hit the post with a penalty kick from straight in front attempting to register his team’s first points, then the club’s marquee signing Taniela Tupou hurt his hand minutes after coming on in the second half, and captain Rob Leota was denied the first try after a teammate yanked a Brumbies jersey off a scrum-break, the ill-fated history of the club was laid bare.
Gordon and some of his big-name Rebels were playing for the first time since the disaster that was the World Cup in France, during which criticism would have to have been turned to white noise there was so much of it before and during the tournament.
That capacity to block out distractions needs to a power all Rebels develop in the coming weeks after a performance which, while spirited, led by proud Victorian Leota, lacked the polish needed to be a Super Rugby force.
“We’re our own worst enemy, in those pressure moments,” Leota said.
Off the field, after a pushback from Melbourne Rebels directors in the Federal Court against a Rugby Australia call to liquidate the club, they were given a 60-day extension for the board to propose an alternative arrangement.
On the field they have just seven days to find something, anything, that could reinflate the energy balloon which fizzled so badly on an opening night which demanded so much more.
REBELS 3
Tries: Nil
Goals: Gordon 1/2
BRUMBIES 30
Tries: Toole (2), Cale (2)
Goals: Lolesio 3/4
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