I think the focal point for me on the weekend is that I dreamt on Saturday night about the previous 14 weeks of Super Rugby in which a number of our quality players had been playing very poor rugby. But when I woke on Sunday the clouds quickly lifted because in the previous nights footy I’d seen quality rugby from potentially quality players.
The first one was Will Genia. His performance on the weekend was a transformation. Suddenly we had a scrum half playing the role properly and his undoubted ability overlaid a quality fundamental performance. Perhaps Queensland’s transformation comes from the number 9 playing the role excellently and the number 10 – Ben Lucas – an undoubted quality player doing the simple things well.
The team performance came together. They’ve never been short of courage Queensland and so it was they were able to add to the fundamentally accurate game and get the result.
I thought Will’s passing fell away a little in the last quarter and his kicking game was too predictable – on every turn over ball, down the tramlines. He needs a dominant fly half who can be calling for it – sometimes that ball needs shifting.
I spent the next few waking hours wondering how this all had happened and I can only assume the Wallaby coaches have stepped in and warned Will about the possibility of not getting picked and what they wanted to see from him. We can’t have a scrum half dawdling across field and moving backwards with the ball in hand. He responded. His angle of running changed dramatically – it was almost like a magic trick. Full marks to whoever’s done it and to Will.
Slightly on the downside was the performance of the Melbourne Rebels, which was way below what they can do. Maybe they were still suffering from the Tahs battering the week before. Luke Jones gave probably his poorest performance of the past two seasons. Let’s hope the selectors see through that and find a spot for him. Just as last season I said that if Hooper missed out for Pocock the Wallabies wouldn’t perform as well, I would say the same for Jones.
The Brumbies weren’t bad either though. They didn’t allow their opposition to ever establish any continued pressure. They denied the Rebels any chance of even taken a short period of superiority in the game. We might not think they were at their best but they never really struggled. The scrum got into trouble at times, but so they got the other scrum in trouble as well.
Interesting the TV station asked the viewers if Matt Toomua deserved his Wallaby selection. ELEVEN percent said no! What have they been looking at? Everything he does is good and much of it is excellent. He must be starting for the Wallabies.
Steve Walsh has a few problems that prevent him from producing a quality ref performance:
- He clearly suffers from faulty eyesight
- I’ve never seen a ref more poorly positioned to make decisions. When he’s reffing and a team is attacking the in goal area, he stands behind the attacking team between five and eight metres to the side, whereas a good ref will be around the front in the in-goal area so that can actually see what might happen.
At one stage when one of the scrums imploded the Brumbies asked why they hadn’t got a penalty and Steve said “sorry fellas, I wasn’t in any position to see accurately what happened”. From a scrum!
As for the Waratahs, I said last week they’re a very good team and could be a great one. This week they took another big step toward that. To take a strangle hold on a game against the Chiefs at home (who are a bit off the boil to be honest) is a great performance. Especially so when we look at the performance of the Referee and TMO.
Some of the TMO decisions coming out of New Zealand are atrocious. It looked to me that Chris Pollock was trying to keep the game even for the first two thirds of the match and then gave up at the end so as to not embarrass himself totally.
Just look at the Chiefs first try: first off the ‘scorer’ knocked the ball forward before applying the downward pressure. Second the guy was clearly offside from the kick through – even the Kiwi commentators could see that! To award the try was just a joke. Then later in the game, when the Tahs had scored in the corner, Pollock had the TMO go right back over to the right wing on the half way line to check whether Horne had stepped into touch, right in front of the assistant ref! In one situation he would bend over backwards to allow a try, in another he’d do whatever he could to disallow it!
I thought the Waratahs were good enough to get above that though and remind me of the best South African teams who can just at times be brutal, but then they have players who can open up sides. Foley continues to impress and must at least be in the 23. Kurtley at 10 would be a mistake for me.
Back to players making a turn-around. Regular readers will know what I’ve said about Sekope Kepu – how he and Scott Higginbotham have set new world records for walking in matches. Low and behold I see him come onto the pitch and put in a significant contribution to the team’s performance – adding enthusiasm and urgency to everything he did, making maybe six telling runs through the first line of defence.
What occurred to me about Sekope is that perhaps he’s been down in the dumps worrying about his performance and it’s impact on his Wallaby chances – and then he gets a vote of confidence from selectors and he responds to it. I’ve said before that only lazy coaches let poor technique go uncorrected. Equally so it’s part of the role of the coach to help a player produce a performance that’s worthy of the player’s ability. There’s no exact science to doing this and you can’t necessarily predict it, but you’ve got to keep searching. It’s the coach’s job.
All in all – dreams aside – a good weekend.
PS – I do not in any way shape or form understand the non selection of Kane Douglas or Ben Mowen for the Wallaby squad. They are playing very good rugby (in the case of Douglas he’s never played better and is probably the top second row in Australia right now – remember his hit on Luke Jones last week) and they are doing it in Australia for Australian teams! The Wallabies second row isn’t looking flash to me, I would have liked to have looked at Jones in the back row – but we’ll need him in the second.
