Tuesday’s Rugby News has the Wallaroos playing Ireland again, WA suing the ARU, Nathan Grey defending his work and Joe Marler talking Lions.
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IRematch
The Wallaroos are set to play Ireland again, after the permutations of the 12-team Women’s World Cup means that they’ve been matched up in 5th place semi-final.
If you don’t remember, the Wallaroos lost to Ireland 19-17 last week. The Wallaroos also lost to France, but beat Japan.
Assistant coach Dwayne Nestor is raring to go.
“It’s about playing our game, we know what we’re going to get from Ireland, and to a degree they know what they’re going to get from us, but we think we may have a few tricks up our sleeve to keep them guessing, and I think we’ll get some pay out of it,” Nestor told rugby.com.au.
“I think they enjoyed the day off, enjoyed seeing a bit of Belfast, refreshed them a little bit, and they’re really buoyed, so I think they’re very excited to play.
“They know they’ve got a big challenge ahead of them to do that, and I think they’re ready for it. I think they’re quietly confident that if they play well, they’ll get the result.”
“I think the girls played really well in terms of playing to our game plan, we knew if we executed well we’d be able to get some gain line and create some opportunities for those girls out wide,” he continued.
“There are a few things I think they could improve on, but I think the reward they got for sticking to our game plan, especially the outside backs, was quite pleasing.”
If Australia beat Ireland, they will play one of either Canada or Wales for 5th place. Meanwhile, NZ, England, France and the US have all made it into the semi-finals.
At the other end, Italy, Spain, Japan and Hong Kong will battle it out for 9th place.
The Wallaroos v Ireland game will be on at 11pm East Coast Elite time/9pm West Coast Battlers time tonight.
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WA Govt Might Sue ARU
More fun.
Fox Sports is reporting that the WA State Government might sue the ARU for $100m for restitution.
The government is currently getting legal advice, with an eye to recouping some of the $17m spent on a new Force training base, $1.5m on the sponsorship deal and $95m spent on upgrading NIB Stadium.
“I think the ARU doesn’t understand exactly what they’ve done to Western Australia and the amount of money and the amount of support that’s been invested in this team,” WA Premier Mark McGowan said.
If the WA government did successfully get a figure like $100m from the ARU, it would bankrupt them.
The news comes in light of the Twiggy Forrest making the outrageous claim that he’d setup a rival league if the Force weren’t reinstated.
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Defencepacito
Giving the people what they want. Nathan Grey’s take on the Wallabies’ defence.
“Yeah, it stings mate. It’s not great. It’s difficult,” the Wallabies defence coach told rugby.com.au.
“But as a coaching group and as a team, we sit down and go through it and you have to take stock. You have to take the good with the bad and deal with what’s going on. You have to look for those rays of sunshine when we get things right, which we do.”
Unsurprisingly, Grey reckons he can turn the Wallabies’ defence around.
“You look at things and as you progress as coach and you look at the situation and how things are going and you are very confident in what you’re doing and the support that you have and the players you are working with,” he said.
“I love working with the players and with the coaches and being part of that group. At the moment, from a defensive perspective things certainly need to improve and we are looking to do that this week.
“In terms of fixing issues, we are searching for consistency and sticking to what we can try and do, and if we do that we can apply pressure.
“We showed that in fits and starts but no-where near in the level we wanted.”
Well what’s Grey gonna do then?
“There’s a few things in terms of where guys are defending positionally and we move guys around a bit. But we train for that,” he said.
“So executing that under the heat of the battle is something we have to be better at and as a coach we are working at that constantly, trying to iron out deficiencies on what we’re doing.”
I don’t think he’s heard the song.
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Party Like It’s 2005
Prop of the 2015 World Cup, England’s Joe Marler (the one with the funky hair), has given a rather frank interview to the Telegraph. In it, Marler gives some insights into being in a touring party where you won’t play for the big boys.
Asked by writer Daniel Schofield whether the Lions tour made him a better player, Marler said “I wouldn’t say that.” What did he learn instead? “How to drink.”
“Rory Best is the one to blame for that,” Marler says. “He is the one to blame for every time I spoke to my wife on Facetime she said ‘are you pissed again?’ And I was ‘of course not’ so that is probably the biggest thing I learned on that tour.
“It was a different tour particularly for the midweek ‘veg’ as we were labelled but it was really enjoyable. It was more like an old school sort of tour basically. I didn’t expect it – I thought those days are kind of gone now. Everything is ultra professional isn’t it?
“More and more guys coming through like the academy boys and you are going out on a social and there is no one drinking which is completely fine, that is their gig, but that is the way I thought the game was going, but obviously not on a Lions tour. I missed the proper old school a little, I am not that old, but it was very enjoyable to do that sort of thing.”
Marler, though, is firm that just because they enjoyed a tipple doesn’t mean they didn’t take the tour seriously.
That didn’t detract from us working our bollocks off as much as we could because we wanted to be part of a successful Lions tour,” Marler said. “We wanted the boys to go out there and win 3-0. We trained very hard and we pushed boys in our positions as hard as we could to make sure they were ready for the Tests.”
Marler also gave his views on the Woodward debacle of ’05.
“I had heard a lot about the 05 tour and the fact that Clive Woodward had taken a big squad and split it – officially split it – they had separate coaching staff and they would travel at different times,” Marler said. “Having experienced what I did in the summer made me understand why he did that more but you don’t need to do that in order to make it work.
“You can still make it work the way we did. You are still altogether – there wasn’t a single separation or faction in that squad, irrelevant of whether the boys were starting in the Tests or the midweek games. It was genuinely a great group of blokes that had a really good time. My drinking ability had to step up a bit.”
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