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This, friends, was Australian rugby’s answer to “the butterfly effect” – the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world, could turn into a typhoon on the other side.
In this case, as the rugby ball bounced on the Toulouse turf between young men raised in Portugal running hard at Fijian’s finest, . . . all of Australian rugby on the other side of the world hung in the balance.
Despite a catastrophic campaign by the Wallabies to date, it was possible, just possible, that if Portugal beat Fiji by more than seven points, then our blokes – paging, Mr Eddie Jones, paging Mr Eddie Jones, please report to the counter for urgent message – would be called back from the airport, and we’d make the quarter-finals after all! Sponsorship dollars would flow, TV contracts renewed, sackings would be spared, obituaries withdrawn, whole careers resuscitated.
And before our very eyes, things looked great from the start. Despite being only considered long shots at best, the Portuguese – just as this columnist for once predicted correctly – were a revelation. Far from falling apart in the face of the Fijian onslaught, the southern Europeans were magnificent in absorbing all the pressure, and returning it in kind, constantly forcing Fijian errors. With the score 3-3 at half-time, some cautious optimism from us Australians was allowable. Yes, Fiji would likely still be too strong, but, look, stranger things have happened? When Portugal scored after 10 minutes of the second half to take a 10-3 lead, we allowed ourselves to cheer, and dream – only for Fiji to score in turn almost immediately afterwards, 10-10. The Portuguese are fading with our chances.
But wait!
Rodrigo Marta of Portugal scores a try against Fiji.Credit: Getty
Now, after another Portuguese try, to take them to a magnificent 17-10 lead with 20 minutes to go, we dare to dream again!
We really can make the quarter-finals! We just need the men in red to hold, and score a penalty to beat them by more than seven points. And look how well they are playing.
And if that happens, we’d be against a weak England side, who we can beat.
Hell, we could even make the semi-finals! And with Will Skelton and Taniela Tupou coming back from injury, who knows how far we could go? Whole rugby empires are rising and falling before our eyes as the ball keeps bouncing, the men from opposite sides of the planet keep running at each other, and the clock winds down.
Alas, Fiji strikes back with a try of their own to make it 17-17, and follow up with two quick penalties – to lead 23-17 with just four minutes to go.
We’re done. It’s over.
I think?
For, hang on a second!
With just a bit more than that to go, the ball bounces on the Fijian left flank, and this time the Portuguese winger regathers to pass it inside to rampaging team-mate Rodrigo Marta, who scores just ten metres to the right of the posts. It is converted by Samuel Marques. The Portuguese lead 24-23 and are on the edge of winning the first World Cup match of their history!
You know what? We Australians still have a chance. A small chance, but a chance it is. Portugal have a one-point lead. We just need them to score one more converted try in the 30 seconds that remain from the kick-off, and we are there!
Alas, alas, while we need a converted try, Portugal merely need to eat up the butterfly’s breath of time that remains, before kicking it out, to win . . . and as their needs trumps ours . . . that is what they do.
The ball goes high into the stands, the referee blows his whistle, and the match is over, as many of the Portuguese players and fans, burst into tears of joy.
What a TRIUMPH. From where I write, I swear I can hear the celebrations exploding in Lisbon. How well they played. It has put the southern Europeans on the rugby map, and they might even dream that at their present rate of progress, the Six Nations could expand to the Seven Nations one day?
For Fiji, it is a loss, and a disappointing one, but no more than that.
For despite the gut-wrenching nature of losing with just seconds to go, they still go through to the quarter-finals to take on an English side that only narrowly beat Samoa, an England that actually lost to Fiji at Twickenham a month ago. So our Pacific cousins can celebrate that at least, and it is as great an achievement for them, as it is a boon to world rugby to have the rising Pacific represented in the final eight teams.
But for the Wallabies? It is the end. After the humiliation of being beaten by Fiji, we can now add as our final humiliation, as someone commented on Twitter, “we have now been beaten by the team that was beaten by Portugal”.
Sorry Mr Jones, false alarm. You are not needed at Marseilles for the quarter-final against England after all. Your flight will be leaving shortly, on time. You can expect some turbulence – we have reports of wild flutters of butterflies fluttering by here, causing cyclones on your approaches to Sydney, but we wish you luck.
This campaign is over.
Conceived in desperation, it was dedicated to the proposition that in such grim times the desperate gamble of sacking the incumbent coach Dave Rennie to replace him with the wild card of Eddie Jones was a chance worth taking. That reasoning was not necessarily flawed. I, for one, thought it was the right thing to do.
But the gamble has failed, and so have the Wallabies. We needed a full-blown miracle, and got one – less the breadth of a butterfly’s wing.
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