Simmons has been a better Wallaby than Douglas ever has.
Say what you want about his Super Rugby form,
Not that I need an invitation
Continuing on my point about Jakeball - for RWC it would seem logical. You're there to win your pool then another three games.
But do we have the forwards in this land to do that? I'm not sure there is time in Wallaby camp to get these guys up to this level - with the varying level of forwards focus in each Super camp, its not like everyone does the same thing.
Compare this to the Poms (in our pool don't forget), who do Jakeball their whole lives. At club level its what they do in order to win games and get noticed, whereas our guys who can scrum a bit and run a lot are worth more than the reverse.
But here we get to the issue with Cheikamania. The first year he had the Tahs, he knew it would take them a long time to get into his way. There were rusty moments in Year 2 as well. The machine didn't start really humming until after the run of losses mid-season, and then it was awesome to behold.
He's going to get these guys in camp for limited time in Europe, the send them back to their provinces (and hopefully have the provinces on board with training etc) before he gets them for a month prior to RWC.
The much-talked-about S&C Program the Tahs used isn't going to have the same time to take effect in the Test environment. So either every province has got to get it or you've got an immediate difference in conditioning, which I think the Tahs showed due to their very low injury list this year was quite important.
So then its natural for Cheika to go with the core of the Tahs squad, with the best bits of the others tacked on.
THEN the claims of NSW bias grow positively cacophonous.
Not that they're ever much quieter