LONG READ 'The success of Skelton, Hooper and Tupou should trigger a rethink on Australia’s overseas selection criteria'

When the rain came, it poured – and then it poured some more. The lightning storm which forced the players off the field for 40 minutes at the Accor stadium in Sydney did not just destroy the rhythm of the game. It also doused the flickering spark of any notion that this was one of the greatest British & Irish Lions teams of all time.

Whatever remained of the fragile flame was extinguished by the sight of Lions’ No.10 Finn Russell scrolling through his mobile phone during the hiatus. It seemed only natural that a member of the backroom team should throw a towel over the camera in the changing sheds after that revelation. The Lions had fought their final battle on the previous weekend and there was precious little emotional and physical energy left at the end of a hyper-extended season for another pinnacle effort.

A collective concentration of purpose there was not, but head coach Andy Farrell bristled at the suggestion his players had failed to use their unexpected down-time seriously after the match: “That’s completely utter rubbish. Utter rubbish.” The coach protected his players like a mother shielding her young, but in reality the Lions were already spent. It is impossible to pretend it is a life-and-death matter if it really isn’t, and Melbourne rather than Sydney was the Lions’ Waterloo.

Russell finished his 2024-25 season in Aussie having been on the pitch for 2819 minutes of play while participating in 38 games. His captain Maro Itoje was not far behind on 2564 minutes and 34 games, and he lasted for 27 minutes before failing an HIA and leaving the field for good in Sydney. Both exceeded the player welfare guidelines which will come into force in the English Premiership next season [30 seasonal game involvements] while the more stringent limits flagged up by France supremo Fabien Galthié [25 games and 2000 minutes] were but a distant pipe-dream.

In the circumstances, the 2025 Lions were good but seldom great. They could play some attractive footy in purple patches, but perhaps mercifully, they were rarely challenged to hit the heights until the final two games of the tour. What of Australia? The second Test in Melbourne and the third in Sydney showed there is a promising side waiting to be selected for the forthcoming Rugby Championship, which kicks off with a two-Test mini tour of South Africa starting a week on Saturday.

There is one all-important caveat. If the Wallabies want to compete in the Republic, their 23-man matchday squad needs to include overseas-based players. The likes of Will Skelton, Tom Hooper, Taniela Tupou and Langi Gleeson can no longer be victimised by a rigid home-based selection policy.

It has taken far too long for Schmidt to realize that his pack for the Lions series had to be built around towering second-row Skelton, despite his club commitments to Ronan O’Gara’s La Rochelle.

In January, only a few days after Gleeson signed with French Top 14 outfit Montpellier, the Waratahs’ back-rower was promptly ‘uninvited’ to Joe Schmidt’s January training camp. Around the same time, the outstanding Australian forward in Super Rugby Pacific 2025, Brumbies’ 4/6 hybrid Tom Hooper, signed a deal with the Exeter Chiefs for ‘roughly double’ the salary he was offered to stay in Australia, and he remained on the outer until the Lions series had already been lost. Tupou is off to Racing 92 in the Top 14 and was mistakenly bumped from the green-and-gold bench in Melbourne in favour of Tom Robertson.

Likewise, it has taken far too long for Schmidt to realize that his pack for the Lions series had to be built around towering second-row Skelton, despite his club commitments to Ronan O’Gara’s La Rochelle. Those are unlikely to permit the locking leviathan to represent the Wallabies in both the Rugby Championship and on the end-of-year tour of Europe.

As Schmidt conceded after events in Sydney:

“[Those conversations] are probably just in their early stages, and they will become a bit clearer probably post-Saturday.

“I’ll be catching up with Will on Sunday, and we’ll confirm a bit of a map forward from there. But he brings a confidence of having the experience of winning things, and he brings a confidence that’s contagious, a little bit. The guys around him get confidence from playing alongside Will.

“He’s a behemoth, really, isn’t he? He’s a very big human, but he’s also agile and skilful, and he’s got great connection in the group. And the other thing is, he is incredibly proud every time he puts that gold jersey on. He’s incredibly keen to be part of things.”

As ex-Wallaby skipper Michael Hooper added pointedly on Stan Sport, “[Skelton] just changed the look and the dynamic of this whole Wallabies team, and everyone around the world [now knows] just how important he is for this Wallabies jersey.” By the time play resumed after the storm warning, Skelton had seen off both the Lions starting locks [Itoje and James Ryan] and he had set the physical and emotional tone for a young Wallabies group. That new attitude will be tested to the limit by the likes of Eben Etzebeth and Pieter-Steph Du Toit in the Republic. South Africa is not the place to give ground, bow to ‘stand-over’ or take a backward step.

Another significant overseas oversight occurred off the pitch. In May, ex-England and Lions second-row Geoff Parling announced he would be leaving the Wallabies coaching group at the end of the Lions series. Parling and his family had been settled happily in Melbourne for seven years before he grasped the opportunity to become head coach at his former club Leicester Tigers in the UK. It is likely his decision was also influenced by Les Kiss’ desire to bring his forwards coach with the Reds, Zane Hilton, into the Wallabies fold in 2026. Both were part of the four-man coaching panel which oversaw a 48-0 loss to the Lions with the AUNZ Invitational XV on the current tour.

The outstanding Australian coaching success in the Lions series was Parling’s leadership of the Wallaby lineout off the field, and his mentorship of lineout caller Nick Frost on it. When Skelton was picked to start the second Test in Melbourne, an extra responsibility fell on the set-piece guru to ensure the Wallaby lineout functioned efficiently.

The main knock on the Bay of Biscay behemoth is that he is not a target on own-throw because of his 135 kilo-plus bulk, and that left the green-and-gold one receiver short at lineout time. The second and third Tests represented a triumph for Parling’s ‘Skelton lineout’ strategy, as the following stats illustrate:

The Wallabies won nearly all their own ball over the last two Tests, with Frost winning 17 throws by himself, and that 94% retention rate alone equates to success. But when Maro Itoje left the field in only the 28^th minute in Sydney, Parling and Frost plotted their own gale-force assault on a Lions lineout led by replacement caller Ollie Chessum. The first gust blew in just before oranges:

Skelton may not be a genuine lineout jumper, but that does not mean he is not an effective lineout player. As the man in the middle of a five-man line, he has to make the key decision whether to buy Chessum’s fake down-to-the-front or follow James Ryan to the tail. The big man picks right and he is able to front-hoist Frost and help the young 6’9 giant to win a clean steal. He repeated the dose when the players returned after the lightning alert:

The Lions bunch to the front, but Skelton is already aware of Tom Curry out of the corner of his eye, edging towards Chessum at the back from the ‘+1’ insert spot. A full three-man lift always gave Frost the advantage in a straight jumping contest with any of the Lions’ receivers. With the added benefit of his huge wing-span he could even intercept throws intended for the space ahead of him:

A gust became a tornado of Lions lineout losses as the game entered its decisive phase in the last 10 minutes:

By the 75^th minute, the Lions had been reduced to taking drop throws to the front, and even then the Wallabies knew what was coming. Instead of competing against the throw they flooded through the lanes on to the scrum-half and won the ball at the ensuing ruck instead.

Australia’s set-piece grip only tightened when it became obvious from the first that Taniela Tupou would be allowed to use the angle he wanted at scrum-time. Towards the end of the first period, ‘Nella’ and his opponent Andrew Porter were running at right-angles towards the far side-line at every scrum:

The rainstorm which interrupted the third Test carried all pretensions to Lions greatness away with it into the Sydney night sky. The 2025 tourists were good, very good in patches, but they were never great. End-of-season exhaustion chips away at a group of players seeking two or three more performance peaks in an already overlong season. Finn Russell even needed his mobile phone to take his mind off rugby, rugby, and yet more rugby in the storm-break; and he couldn’t be bothered to hide it from the camera after 38 games.

The premonition of greatness was also dispelled by the variable quality of the opposition, even during the Test series itself. Australia got off on the wrong foot and they didn’t play off the front foot until Skelton was firmly established in the starting XV. The tourists only faced the prospect of losing on two occasions, and they won the first and lost the second of those games.

The success of Skelton and Hooper and Tupou should trigger a rethink on RA’s overseas selection criteria, because the Wallabies are not yet at a level where they can afford to be without their top talents, wherever on planet rugby they happen to be plying their trade. If that lesson has not already been learned, two Tests against the world champions in their own backyard will be sure to underline it in big, bold red letters.