RWC 2015 Argentina vs Australia: How Graham Henry helped set the Pumas free

World Cup-winning coach opened the door to more expansive game, while joining the former Tri-Nations made Argentina battle-hardened, reports Hugh Godwin

Fly-half Nicolas Sanchez is held aloft by Lucas Noguera (left) and Matias Moroni after Argentina’s win over Ireland in Cardiff (Getty Images)

The Argentine team that will kick off its debut Super Rugby season against the Free State Cheetahs in South Africa in February has yet to be given a name. How about Los Aventureros– “the adventurers”? It would be in keeping with how the national side has lit up the World Cup, most recently in Sunday’s quarter-final thrashing of Ireland in Cardiff.

With a largely unheralded head coach, Daniel Hourcade, at the helm since Santiago Phelan resigned in 2013, Argentina have evolved in scintillating alignment with the modern game, away from up-the-jumper forward domination to all-court power and pace.

A crucial influence has been Sir Graham Henry, hired as a part-time consultant for two years after winning the World Cup with New Zealand in 2011. Henry told the Pumas: “You have to score more tries.” Agustin Pichot, Argentina’s charismatic scrum-half and captain turned political mover and shaker, has said: “Graham gave us a simple way of playing better rugby. He said we were not going to do it the All Black way – we were going to do it the Argentinian way.”

That way has an outer core of Hourcade’s outward-looking philosophy mingled with tear-jerking national pride. The coach said on Sunday: “It’s part of our DNA that we play with our hearts in our hands, we feel it inside and the players show this on the pitch.”

The inner core is technical excellence. Playing a wide game is a highway to hopelessness unless there is quick distribution from the breakdown, with the right amount of resources committed to delivering it, plus pinpoint passing: flat or deep, short or long.

In the pool match with Tonga in Leicester, watched by an ebullient Diego Maradona, there were as many fumbles as there were tries. The Cardiff quarter-final was much more precise, with the standard set in Argentina’s opening try by Matias Moroni after two minutes. It centred on the flanker Juan Fernandez Lobbe gathering the ball on the bounce and flinging a brilliant miss-pass, 12 metres in length, to Santiago Cordero on the right wing.

Argentina had run both their first two pieces of possession in their own 22. This approach needs forwards who are quick in support and good as distributors. The hooker and captain Agustin Creevy was nicknamed “Sonny Bill” (after the New Zealand centre Sonny Bill Williams) during his two seasons playing for Montpellier, for his offloading prowess. Lobbe’s back-row foil Pablo Matera is a dynamic carrier of a blindside flanker.

With all this working, we have been dazzled by the fascinatingly varied back three. Juan Imhoff has long deserved world acclaim for his 21 tries in 34 Tests, including a hat-trick in the famous win over South Africa in August – the first player in 124 years to do that against the Springboks.

His father Jose Luis, a former Pumas player, coached the 1999 World Cup team who knocked Warren Gatland’s Ireland out. Argentina beat Ireland again in 2007, and Scotland in 2011, when Imhoff junior had his breakthrough World Cup, so we had been warned.

But the full-back Joaquin Tuculet had garnered few headlines in spells with Sale, Grenoble, Bordeaux-Begles and Cardiff Blues, while the whirligig Cordero was focused on sevens until the big wing Manual Montero was injured. “Coach Hourcade tells me I should back myself,” Cordero said in a World Cup programme article. “If the situation is on, and I have confidence in what I see in front of me, he will support me.”

Tuculet, 26, said he and his school friends were energised watching on TV as the Pumas made the semi-finals of the 2007 World Cup, held in France.

Off the field, there has been big change and sacrifices made. The first idea proposed by Pichot was for a team based in Spain to enter the Six Nations Championship, and put two professional sides into the Celtic League. The Six Nations Council turned Pichot down.

Instead, and to Argentina’s huge advantage it now appears, the Pumas joined the Tri-Nations, renamed as The Rugby Championship, with Australia, New Zealand, South Africa in 2012.


 Sir Graham Henry spent two years with Argentina as a consultant
 (GETTY IMAGES)

World Rugby pumped in US$10m of start-up funding. Following a clear path of development, Hourcade looked after the sevens and women’s teams, before winning four Americas Rugby titles with the second-string Argentina Jaguars, and reaching a Vodacom Cup final with the third-string Pampas.

The Vodacom Cup is a South African provincial competition, so it needed Argentina’s developing players to relocate to Stellenbosch and Potchefstroom. Five forwards who played against Ireland on Sunday – Matera, Facundo Isa, Tomas Lavanini, Guido Petti and Lucas Noguera – were born in 1993 or 1994 and played in the World Under-20 Championship.

The downside? Maybe the scrum has become an area of comparative weakness; an Ireland pack missing three first choices managed to gain a couple of penalties from the Pumas. The fear of the bajada – Argentina’s primal, patented eight-man shove – has dissipated.

We like this game, the players love it and they like carrying it through

&#13; <p>Daniel Hourcade, Argentina head coach</p>&#13;

But the contrast is seen most in Juan Martin Hernandez. Working off a reliable set-piece in the 2007 World Cup, the man nicknamed El Mago (“the magician”) was deployed at fly-half mainly to whack the ball down the field and use the runners led by the big full-back Ignacio Corleto. It was stunningly effective until an attempt to be more expansive in the semi-final against the equally formidable South Africa fell apart, 37-13.

This summer, one of Imhoff’s tries in Durban came when Hernandez caught everyone off-guard by tapping a penalty. Montero’s try on Sunday began with a kick by Hernandez, but it continued with Tuculet winning an aerial battle in the modern style. At fly-half, Nicolas Sanchez has picked up the baton. “Sometimes we think of Nico as a defensive player,” Hourcade said on Sunday, “but he showed today he is a complete all-round player.”

There have been more than twice as many tries scored per match in the Rugby Championship than the Six Nations in the last three years. Hourcade said: “We like this game, the players love it and they like carrying it through.”

Creevy plays for Worcester, but he is contracted to return home and represent the new Super Rugby team. Imhoff, Lobbe, Leicester’s Marcos Ayerza and Saracens’ Marcelo Bosch are among those who will not, so some disruption to the Pumas lies ahead.

For now, when Creevy was asked if Maradona would be making good on his promise to attend the semi-final if Argentina got there, the hooker smiled the smile of a man happy to have bigger priorities. “Maybe he will be there, I don’t know. We know we will.”