When was the last time both SA and Aus were top 5 teams? 2015?
Using the same rating system that gave Wales the #1 spot going to the world cup.
After 2007's WC, other than England, I've felt comfortable facing any NH side in a WC game. Not that we were favourites, and of course we can lose and probably would have, but I've never felt "****, they are going to tear us a new one" when facing Ire/Wal/Fra, let alone Sco/Ita. I've felt that with RSA, NZ and Aus. There is a reason why the worst of those three has more world cup trophies than all the NH combined.
We are a very temperamental team. It wouldn't take much of a stretch to think that on a good day, our 2019 side (not particularly good by any metric) could beat Wales 2019 (best in the world according to WR's rankings).
We never get a break on TRC. We have no easy games like Italy, an occasional poor Scotland or today's Welsh side (pi). Every single TRC game is an uphill battle for us. I can't recall a single game where we went to the game and an unbiased observed would say: "yeah, Argentina is clearly the favourite here". Not a single one. Couple of 50-50s (out of 43 games today), nothing more.
But we know exactly what he signed up for and what we are trying to accomplish here.
Everything we do, absolutely everything, from TRC to SR has one and only one goal in mind: preparing ourselves to perform at the WC. That is why 2019 was such a catastrophic failure for us. Even before 2015 WC our coaches said the goal was 2019.
And i think we are slowly getting there. 1999 and 2007 were landmark years where we broke the ceiling and got into tier 1, if you will. After that, i think we improved and somehow managed to stay there., The thing is, we did so by facing what have been historically 3 out of the best 4 in the world, so we are, on average, underrated when it comes to ratings given how these are calculated. The next step is to get from being in the bottom half of tier 1 to the top half. It will take time. We know that.
A lot of people compare us to Italy. I don't see it that way. I really don't. I see progress. I see how we've gone from losing every game in TRC to beating every team away from home. I've see us go from not getting our of the group stages in SR to getting to the final and throwing everything but the sink at the eventual champions. Again, it takes time. I see most NH teams trying out new players and resting others when they face Italy. When i look at us i see that we punish that sort of behaviour (you could argue it cost the Lions a SR ***tle, to name one example).
I also think player selection for 2019 was a huge issue (cordero, imhoff, facundo isa, diaz bonilla were not even present). Not talking about a couple of nobodies but 4/5 key players. It is to this day that people still question Ledesma for that.
Next step is probably to gain consistency and in order to do that we need more depth. It shows a lot when you see most of us 1h vs 2h results.
The signal, the key signal this result yielded is the potential we have, which was something we had began to question. We needed this result to stay on course. The rest is hard adding tons of hours of hard work behind it, but we now know, or confirm, that we've got the right ingredients to work with.
Those are there and i believe today we showed them in spades.
