Wallabies branded 'crap'

[Burgs]

I haven't seen any Finals matches as yet so I don't know about England but in general he is right, Australia has a crap Front Row because crap (and specifically two) players keep getting persisted with.
If the new Wallaby Coach does only one thing different to Eddie and Knuckles I pray that is he drops Trestle and Donut for ever!
They are barely Super 14 worthy, let alone International Props!
We can continue with our head in the sand saying all the bad press is wrong or actually accept the facts and start developing better options.
It is a sad indictment on Australian Props that our best in the last few years hasn't been a dominating player but Bill Young who played out of his skin to keep us competitive by using every conceivable trick in the book, mainly illegal, so our Forwards weren't totally humiliated.
In my mind the new Squad needs to identify at the end of this Super 14 Season four players for each of the three positions who will be there in 2011 and focus on developing them as a unit.
That doesn't preclude others from playing Tests, just that there will be a special focus on the unit structure of the chosen development players.
You would imagine that this would see the best front row from each Aus S14 anyway but that was proven not to be the case this year with the omission of McIsaac and Jeremy Paul.

[hopep]

Well you wont see any change if McKenzie gets the nod. He refers to 'Trestle' as his "protoge", I'm happy to admit we need a renewed vigour and structure in the front row, but overall the forwards played OK in RWC matches. Yes the Poms were the toughest encounter - but the scrums did not cost us the game, the breakdown cost us the game. That was my point - and the fact that Poms have no concept of seeing anything in postive in their own team, they 'only won because (insert team) played crap'. not a suportive sentiment.

[James]

I think Australia is and has always been a master of using ball from a successful set-piece (or at least with Larkham anyway). Yeah the Poms beat us at the breakdown but that was compounded by our ineptitude in the scrum. Its been so long since we've got quality ball off the back of a scrum (we weren't even getting quality line-out ball in 2005) we've forgotten about all of those extra attacking options. Fix the scrum and we are less dependent on winning the battle of the breakdown.