Up the Guts
Steve Williams (59)
The correlation between the All Blacks doing poorly and posts about Deans being the best thing to happen to Australian rugby is very high.
The correlation between the All Blacks doing poorly and posts about Deans being the best thing to happen to Australian rugby is very high.
I don't see the point in comparing with Deans personally.
Deans did pretty well with a full generation of highly talented players. They were experienced and he wasnt consistently losing his best and most experienced talent to Europe or Japan. He pushed them to 2nd in the world and the only reason he never managed first was that his tenure coincided with the GOAT NZ side.
Don't you think you're underselling that period a tad?
I recall Deans got the Wallabies to 2nd ranked in the world for 3 years? I'd say that's a pretty decent achievement for a country in which union is merely an after-thought & rarely gets acknowledged in the sport's section of your local weekly publication.
More importantly, the rest of the world has improved dramatically since then.Not really. He had good players to work with and weaker opposition (outside NZ). Plus you are underselling Rugby, particularly 10+ years ago.
Sure it'll never be AFL but it's popular enough (or was) to produce world cup winning talent.
An obscene amount of talent in that backline. Wish we could fuck with the timeline and marry our current tight five with them.
An obscene amount of talent in that backline.
Meh, not really. At least not refined talent anyway. Young players like Cooper, Beale, O'Conner.. certainly couldn't match
the composure of their NZ counterparts. Badly error-prone. For every skittering run, there was a dropped ball or regulatory tackle missed. That 'talent' that Deans had certainly weren't of the quality that was produced under the NZ system. Sure those players had a certain level of flair, but they all lacked the mental fortitude, rugby brains & composure of players that would come through the NZ system at test-level. A player like Quade Cooper wouldn't have lasted long in the NZ system at all. Lack of competitiveness for positions played it's part in that. NZ players can't take their circumstances for granted, as tons of other players challenging for their spot, and they're only one poor game from getting the flick. See the complete opposite - the three amigos, young, entitled, city-boys, lacking the groundedness of humble rural Cantabs such as Carter, McCaw etc.. the former recipe didn't result in composed test players, something that Deans couldn't help. He had to deal with the individual entitlement & player-power of that rabble.
Bullshit. We had plenty of talent hanging around and even better players coming through. You really think this lot is comparable to Folau, Genia, Pocock et al? nar. Shit we could afford to drop Giteau. Plus we had more than two professional first grade locks.
Wait huh?
In the game Deans beat the All Blacks in his first year (34-19) the Wallabies lineup was:
1-8: Benn Robinson, Stephen Moore, Al Baxter, James Horwill, Nathan Sharpe, Rocky Elsom, Wycliff Palu
9-15: Burgess, Giteau, Tuqiri, Barnes, Cross, Hynes, AAC (Adam Ashley-Cooper)
16-22: TPN, Dunning, Vickerman, Waugh, Cordingly, Tahu, Mitchell
By no means could that team be considered "one of the youngest Wallaby teams to take the field". Of that team, almost all were in their prime, and in their prime I'd take the following for our squad:
Moore, Horwill, Sharpe, Elsom, Palu, Giteau, Tuqiri, AAC (Adam Ashley-Cooper), TPN, Vickerman, Waugh, Mitchell
He dropped Giteau in the fourth year as coach. This is kind of my point. You're lining up Deans two thirds of the way through his tenure against Rennie after 5 tests.
Genia, Pocock and Folau all debuted under Deans.
Going into that test some of the younger players that became key players had the following number of caps:
Robinson (10)
Moore (23)
Horwill (5)
Palu (20)
TPN (4)
Barnes (8)
Mitchell (22)
AAC (Adam Ashley-Cooper) (15)
A lot of the players that became mainstays under Deans either started that period with very little experience or debuted during his time.
Of the players that featured a lot for Deans that started as highly experienced, it's really just Sharpe, Smith, Elsom, and Giteau. Most of the other older players were done within a couple of years.
I don't think Rennie's position is massively different to this. It's going to take a few years before we work out whether the young guys he's got with very few caps or have just debuted have the sort of talent that the players that were stars under Deans had (Pocock, Beale, Genia, Cooper).
He's got a bunch of players who look like they'll be mainstays of his squad over the next few years in the 10-30 or so cap space that would line up with the group above (Ala'alatoa, Sio, Tupou, LSL (Lukhan Salakaia-Loto), Koroibete, Fainga'a).
All those players have multiple super xv seasons under there belts on top of those caps. Rennie has inherited players who don't even have 1 proper super xv season under there belt.
Perhaps more a question for Wallabies 2021, but the captaincy going forwards obviously there was quite a bit of debate about Hooper retaining the captaincy for 2020, a lot of people have been critical of his decision making in the Argentina game, the same sort of issue that has dogged him much of his career.
What do we do going forwards?
Who could potentially take the reins in 2020?
I've got a better idea why don't the players just execute their skill areas. BPA throwing straight, Phillip calling the right jumper, jumper catching it and the rest of the forwards correctly setting the maul.