I just hope that Cheika and staff make a serious and honest reflection on 2016. There were some serious errors of judgement IMO. I also agree with what IS said over on the England match thread about parachuting overseas based players in for certain tests. Short term it might have papered over a couple of cracks, but if long term thinking is what we're on about then it's completely the wrong thing to be doing.
I will defend Chubby on this one. For starters, I assume that the introduction of the Giteau Law was taken by the ARU after a considered analysis of the pros and cons.
I thought at the time that it was a brilliant move, and when we made it through to the World Cup final it was validated in spades. We all thought, and I would include everybody who loves rugby in Australia, that getting through to the World Cup final, coupled with the success of our Women in Rio, would represent a major turning point for the game.
We had broken through, it was going to be blue skies from now on.
We were wrong, but that does not mean that Giteau's Law was intrinsically wrong. Having said all that, I did believe that this year had to be a rebuilding year, and so I was a bit surprised when the NH players were invited to Camp Wallaby. But I was still prepared to give Chubby the benefit of the doubt, hoping that the end of better results would justify what seemed to be a stop-gap measure.
At the end of the day, our player resources are severely limited compared to the other leading nations. So we have to be smarter and more creative than we have been in the past. If that means selecting overseas-based players, fine, why not? But only after very careful consideration on a case by case basis.