Australians are playing the long game
DO NOT bet against Australia winning the World Cup in 2011 but wager your mortgage against this 2009 team emulating such great Wallaby teams as the 1984-ers and leaving these shores with another Grand Slam. The Home Nations should give up if they do. Coach Robbie Deans is using this tour as the launch pad for 2011. Australian eyes are staring over the horizon towards New Zealand and the only competition by which this thinly populated rugby union nation judges itself.
The name of the new captain is familiar enough. Rocky Elsom, the outstanding performer in last season’s Heineken Cup with Leinster, has replaced Stirling Mortlock as leader. The blindside is one of the Wallabies’ five world-class players and his will be the standard set and the one followed.
Yet of the four other global reputations, two of them, Nathan Sharpe and that imposing competitor Mortlock, are nursing injuries in Australia while George Smith was replaced for yesterday’s match with New Zealand by the 21-year-old openside flanker David Pocock. This leaves Matt Giteau as the only other bona fide superstar in the Wallaby camp while the ankle injury suffered by Berrick Barnes, the new vice-captain, weakens them even further.
Expect thunder from the new captain and lightning from the fly-half but these talents are the exceptions not the essence of this Wallaby work in progress. David Dennis sums them up better. David who? The 23-year-old flanker has played one Super 14 match, back in 2007. Since then he has injured both knees and played at no higher a level than Sydney University, whom he captained to the New South Wales club championship. It would be the equivalent of Martin Johnson choosing the Exeter Chiefs captain, Tom Hayes, for England’s summer tour of Australia.
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Admittedly Dennis is touring for the experience but other youngsters will take centre stage, none more so than Will Genia, at 21 a scrum-half touted to replace George Gregan. Already capped seven times, he was chosen for the Tri-Nations despite being injured for two months. His game glimmered with occasional touches of gold in Tokyo yesterday but there remain flaws. What would you expect at his age?
Pocock, the man who deposed Smith (another clear indication of the priority given to the future over the present) for yesterday’s starting XV, is another 21-year-old but one whose development is ahead of Genia’s. He is a robust defender and abrasive ball-carrier and — in the best tradition of Australian opensides — a hound at the breakdown. He scavenges and steals superbly. That priceless ability is what usually makes the Wallabies difficult to break down.
Were Pocock and Smith English, nobody would even contemplate that such a supreme performer at international level would be omitted for the rookie but the Wallabies do things differently and that is probably why they have won two World Cups despite their relatively thin playing resources.
As for the latest injury to Barnes, Deans has decided that, whoever the next best in line might be, he is not good enough and has called for Matt To'omua, the Australian Under-20s fly-half. Australia might be struggling for results but they are undaunted in Deans’ pursuit of the long-term goal of 2011; which brings us to James O’Connor, the full-back with the choirboy looks disguising that abrasive Aussie spike. He has just turned 19 and already has 11 caps, seven as a starter and four as a replacement.
He was as fascinating an individual as the Tri-Nations threw up in a rather turgid year’s competition. He could perform as if his destiny was to develop into one of the great players, with his regal unveiling perfectly timed for 2011. On other days , when he was battered and bullied beneath the high-ball game of Australia’s rivals, you wondered whether the NSPCC should be told.
He made some calamitous blunders but never lost self-belief. Through the early errors the talent will emerge. The best talents are not ruined by being recognised prematurely. They are wasted by being ignored when they need promotion. Clive Woodward understood this more than perhaps any other England coach because his formative intellectual rugby spell was during his Manly days. To blood the child Wilkinson in that infamous 76-0 defeat in Brisbane accelerated the learning curve. The lesson has been forgotten in our conservative northern climes and the thought of a precocious talent, perhaps Joe Simpson of Wasps, being unleashed from the bench into international rugby is shelved for the option of an exposed competitor such as Richard Wigglesworth.
What Deans is doing with his selection is brave. The Wallabies might focus more exclusively than we do on the World Cup but five defeats from six Tri-Nations games leaves him little leeway for error. This is essentially a school trip for many of this squad. There is no reason they should not develop, although the reasons they could lose are myriad. The polar opposite applies to England.
