A new look at pack mentality
Stathi Paxinos
November 16, 2010
AUSTRALIAN rugby must change its narrow-minded view and begin to think creatively to have any hope of overcoming its scrummaging woes, Melbourne Rebels forwards coach Mark Bakewell said yesterday.
The Wallabies' scrum has often been exposed by such powerhouses as New Zealand, South Africa and England and is held up as a pivotal reason why the national side has failed to consistently match it with the better teams in recent years. While Australia's fortunes were seen to be on the rise in recent months, its scrum was again exposed by Wales before the Wallabies' bubble-bursting loss to England at the weekend.
Bakewell, who has spent the past decade coaching overseas, said Australia had to its detriment underplayed the importance of scrums and set pieces in favour of attractive, free-flowing football. When asked if he found such an attitude difficult to accept, Bakewell said that ''it's funny it is now; when I left 10 years ago it wasn't''.
''One of the big things is that I've been lucky to have coached in Australia, Japan and particularly England and France. When you experience other cultures you look outside your own boundaries,'' he said. ''Australia is stuck in the south of the world and we are very alienated in a lot of ways and we do think one specific way and we don't tend to think outside the square and I didn't realise that until I went overseas and realised that, in fact, we're pretty narrow in our thinking.
''What you do is you tend to avoid your weaknesses … I think with Australia we think we can manage without having a great scrum, that we can still win games. That's not the right mentality - you've got to be strong in every facet of the game.''
Bakewell, who was with the Rebels at the Super team's training camp at Falls Creek, said Australia ''culturally [did not] attribute enough time towards scrummaging''.
''We don't look at it as important as some of the other nations [do],'' Bakewell said. ''In Australia we're very much a culture of playing with width and throwing the ball around and we've got very much that sort of mentality where we have a crack at it and we want to all play with the ball in hand and I think that's because from the age of four or five we're taught to get out there and play touch rugby with our mates and throw the ball around.'' He said that Australia did not have the unified approach to scrummaging seen in New Zealand, where Mike Cron oversaw a national approach from the All Blacks to the provincial teams and junior squads.
''There's not a lot of pulling for a common goal and I think that has been evident in Australia for a long time,'' he said. ''Our focus on scrummaging isn't helped by the fact that we all don't work together for a common purpose, so for me it is about creating a level of importance for the scrum here which is absolutely critical.''
Otherwise, he said, situations occur such as the rapid rise and fall of Rebels recruit Rodney Blake. The powerhouse prop was a cult hero in Queensland and hailed as the next big thing for the Wallabies but his star quickly fell as technical deficiencies were exposed in his scrummaging. He spent the past two seasons in France before receiving a chance to resurrect his career with the Rebels.
''The problem [with Blake] was that Australia at that time, and historically, were crying out for good props,'' Bakewell said. ''What we've got to do is be more consistent as coaches in developing the guys we've got so we're not relying on one bloke every 10 years to come [along].''
