Robbie Deans builds Wallabies team of worker bees
Wayne Smith, Rugby union editor | May 21, 2009
Article from: The Australian
MORE and more the Wallabies are coming to resemble Robbie Deans' old Crusaders, not so much in terms of manpower but of mindset.
It was a squad of worker bees Deans named yesterday. Admittedly, with such heavy-hitting players as Wycliff Palu, Digby Ioane and Hugh McMeniman all on the casualty list, he didn't have a lot of choice. From the players he had available, he was never going to be able to assemble a team to smash through the All Blacks, let alone the Springboks.
But where Australia lost the last two Bledisloe Cup Tests in the second half last year, this time Deans has chosen a team capable of physically wearing down the All Blacks and outlasting them.
"The capacity to work and to persevere is going to be one of the attributes we're seeking," Deans explained.
"You've only got to look at our recent experiences to see why."
Work ethic and perseverance - it would be difficult to find other words that better encapsulate the best attributes of the Deans-coached Crusaders.
The Wallabies coach wasn't entirely buying into the suggestion that this Australian team is largely scalpel and no sledgehammer but he did concede that mobility in this squad was up on last year, so too workrate.
"They will have to cover up that deficiency (of impact players), if indeed there is that deficiency.
"Besides, we're developing an `impactability' in the front-row which hopefully will cater for some of these supposed deficiencies."
Great word, that, "impactability", and never better applied than to the likes of props Benn Robinson, Ben Alexander and newcomer Pek Cowan and hookers Stephen Moore and Tatafu Polota-Nau, all of whom have extended the range of their skills so far beyond the set-pieces that they risk expulsion from the Fat Front-rowers' Union.
Much as Deans' selections, particularly in the forwards, have been dictated by injury, they also have been made with an eye to a recent IRB law interpretation that may or may not have been prompted by Australia, depending on whether that's seen as progressively proactive or as further evidence of Australia's secret and sinister plot to turn rugby into basketball.
Anyway, it's just possible Australia put it to the IRB that it was a little like stopping in the middle of an intersection on a green light to police the tackle rule so that the player who was first legally over the ball could only play it with his hands until someone else arrived and a ruck was formed, at which point "hands off".
Following a truly enlightened - and hence extremely rare - judgment by the IRB, the initial player over the ball won't forfeit his rights to continue playing it with his hands even after the ruck has formed.
The ramifications of this interpretation could be immense, and not just in terms of embarrassing the rugby scribes who got it uniformly wrong in predicting Phil Waugh wouldn't be selected.
Certainly the ruling must have enhanced hard-at-the-ball Waugh's selection prospects, with Deans even conceding that if the tackle contest starts to heavily favour the player arriving first at the breakdown, then it's possible the failed George Smith-Waugh flanker pairing experiment might even be revisited.
But it wasn't Waugh who was the main beneficiary of the new rule interpretation so much as uncapped Western Force backrower Matt Hodgson.
"There is no doubt that Hodgson's ability over the ball was a contributing factor to his selection," Deans acknowledged.
If that was "a" contributing factor to Hodgson's selection, "the" contributing factor would surely have been the coaching he has received from John Mitchell at the Western Force.
Say what you like about Mitchell's man management skills - and heaven knows, a lot has been said - but the man can coach. As a result, the Force has 10 representatives in the 29-man Wallabies squad, albeit with three of them, Matt Giteau, Josh Valentine and Drew Mitchell, heading back east next season and a fourth, James O'Connor, threatening to follow them.
That's an exceptional achievement and even if Giteau, Valentine, Mitchell and Nathan Sharpe arrived in Perth as Wallabies already, all are now significantly better players than they were when they landed.
And while O'Connor and flanker David Pocock had been identified as future Wallabies long before joining Mitchell's program, both have made it into the Australian side in double-quick time.
That leaves Cowan, Hodgson, Richard Brown and Ryan Cross - none ever considered more than good, honest players - who have developed into Australian representatives primarily because of what they have been taught at the Force.
What makes all this particularly pertinent is that O'Connor has said one of the main factors determining whether he stays with the Force or follows Giteau to the Brumbies is "rugby development". So tick one box for Perth.
Unfortunately for the Force, there's a second box.
"For my personal development, I need a good 10 (five-eighth) inside me," O'Connor said yesterday.
"I personally don't think I'm ready to play 10 yet. The less responsibility I have, the better."
O'Connor perhaps is selling himself short. He looks more than ready to run a backline. But in the meantime, it wouldn't hurt the Force to get Springbok five-eighth Peter Grant's signature on a contract as soon as possible.
As for the worker bee Wallabies, they'll have a sting in their tail with young O'Connor playing at fullback.
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