Most neutrals would say Ireland have the better team. The wider context for this three-match series will be as a bellwether for both teams in next year’s World Cup in Japan, but let’s leave that for 2019. This series should be enjoyed for itself.

When poor old rugby in Australia needs all the help it can get, however, this marquee series is wedged into a pause in the Not-Very-Super Rugby season and timed as a curtain-raiser for the Rugby Championship later in the winter. The Wallabies’ schedule like those restaurants where you would like to order every entrée on the menu while the mains look a bit blah.

As with Australian cricket’s summer scheduling mishits, the reasons lie in history: essentially, the failure of past results to forecast future outcomes. In Australia, interest in the home nations suffered for many years from most of them (but not Ireland, interestingly) sending second-rate teams. Easy wins at a time of strength in the Australian game produced the impression that the only fair-dinkum benchmarks for the Wallabies were New Zealand and, when readmitted, South Africa.

This is an outmoded view to which programming is adapting all too slowly. The resurgence of the home nations, now more than a decade old, can be illustrated by their recent performances in Australia. Scotland won here on their most recent two visits, last year and in 2012. England defeated Australia 3-0 on Australian soil in 2016. The British Lions won 2-1 in 2013.

Australia has prevailed over France, Italy and Wales, but against British teams overall, in the six-year cycle of tours that concludes this year, Australia has only won four of eleven Test matches. Back when these tours were planned, this would have been considered impossible. The 1980s and 1990s, when the home nations could produce one world-class team between them in a good year, are a distant memory.

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Another reason this Ireland series is so tasty is its contrast against the gradual slackening of tension in the Rugby Championship. It’s not only the All Blacks’ dominance or Argentina’s struggles to be competitive since their entry in 2012. It’s the repetitious pattern of results throughout that competition. Year after year, Australia splits its games with South Africa, winning at home and losing away. These teams have played each other 57 times since South Africa’s readmission in 1992, and the away team has won just 10 times. Because they play each other two or three times a year, the predictability of the results has been boring for quite a while.

Australia’s results against New Zealand are likewise Groundhog Day, a feeling also aggravated by too much of a good (or bad) thing. The Rugby Championship’s lapse into familiar patterns – New Zealand first, Argentina last, the Wallabies and Springboks trading the middle places – has not engendered the kind of grudge-match tension of Origin rugby league, which certainly hasn’t suffered through one team’s dominance. There are strong bilateral rivalries, but as a tournament it lacks fizz. By the end of August, the Rugby Championship is commonly dragging along through a long tail of dead rubbers. Little wonder that SANZAAR is on the brink of dissolution. Context for individual matches is all very well, but context without variation is an empty shell.

The decline of the Rugby Championship, and even its abandonment, would be no bad thing for rugby, if only it can seize the moment. The rise of the home nations can fill a competitive vacuum If the Rugby Championship in its present form were dismantled, Australia-Ireland could take its deserved place as the premier event of this rugby winter. Australia-New Zealand and Australia-South Africa Test matches could regain the scarcity value of stand-alone series played in alternate years, instead of going through the motions in the interminable Rugby Championship.

Whether such a reform is possible would come down to the risks a small country like Australia would be prepared to take. Unfortunately it wields little power in the international scheme of things. Hence rugby’s number one problem, rules that are dictated from the northern hemisphere for a game that is, in Australia, in a unique struggle for survival against local codes that respond nimbly to local tastes. Exhibit A: Wednesday’s Origin match, a free-flowing showcase of rugby league
created in part by a reversal of refereeing policies that could have been effected by one
phone call from head office. That’s how easily league can control its destiny. By sad
contrast, for as long as rugby’s rules are run from so far away, the code fights an uphill battle against games run from Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Nevertheless, a show of independence from both World Rugby and SANZAAR would at least give Australian fans an injection of hope.

Michael Cheika has selected a Wallabies team that recognises the significance of the fixture, with his best-possible backline, his two champion flankers in David Pocock and Michael Hooper, and a forward pack that looks fresh but not experimental.

Inside the bubble, a Test series against Ireland surely holds its proper value. Cheika, it goes without saying, is pathologically focused on winning. Australia’s determined fight to wrest the debutant Pete Samu away from New Zealand symbolises the importance of the fixture for those who are intimately involved.

Never can Australian rugby have been so desperate for its shopfront to shine. Deep-seated structural problems, the divisions exposed by the Israel Folau matter and the evaporation of once-Super Rugby will not be stopped by a radiant Wallabies performance and a great series with Ireland, but the game here just needs something to help it feel good about itself.

It’s facing tough competition. Never mind the Irish, the Wallabies are coming out during a sporting month that is hog heaven for fans. Whether you follow league (Origin), football (the FIFA World Cup), tennis (Roland Garros), basketball (the NBA finals), golf (the US Open), cricket (Australia in England) or the ubiquitous AFL, you are spoilt for choice.

You will only make the time to watch the Wallabies if you are a loyalist or if they demand your attention. In Ireland, they have the perfect drawcard. Now it’s up to them to give their supporters a style and a game that rewards our willingness to care.