That was a good performance by England against Oz: they were too good for our lads. Being "out-physicalled", and belted in scrums and restarts by England in any form of rugby is no new thing, but the surprise to me was that they handled the draining conditions better than our lot. By comparison our lads looked poorly prepared for the heat and humidity.
I mentioned when this Oz team was picked that, notwithstanding that some fellows weren't available, it had a poor balance of players. There were only two forwards in the squad and sometimes only one of the park. The problems they had in the scrums and and at the breakdown were on the cards and sadly I found the efforts of Cummins doing his best comical sometimes.
Oz also lacked true flyers who could take outside breaks or make breaks in midfield due to speed from half chances; but this was also foreshadowed earlier, as was the lack of steppers to make inroads up the middle.
The new Sevens team that will start playing before Xmas will be better than the Comm. Games team once they have a bit of experience together. Hopefully we'll have a flyer or two and the passports of the steppers will be acceptable to the IRB once more. They will probably have 4 forwards in the squad of 12, instead of 2, and hopefully one of them will be a fit Vanderglass. Mind you, they'll have to find another quarterback because Stannard may be committed to Super rugby.
If all that works out we could win a tournament next year to match the one we won in 2010. Then we may start to wonder what went so wrong in the Comm. Games when we had 2 forwards.
