BRUCE & DAVE ARE OFFICIALLY ON SUICIDE WATCH

Results of the last poll. 60% said Eddie Jones should get the boot.

Below is a rambling diatribe written after watching the Wallabies play England, half the Irish match and the Welsh Match. In a sad twist of fate I told everyone to back the Welsh against the Wallabies as they were paying nearly $5 and I had watched the Welsh forwards dominate the Boks the week before. Fabs Fenton agreed he also had the inside word, the only problem was that I was stuck at a trendy Paddington Pub (not a gay pub) that had no TAB, very un-Australian. So everyone got on the Welsh and not me, I was absolutely shattered.

It just keeps getting worse for Eddie Jones and the Wallabies, the performance against England was the lowest point so far. The forwards and particularly the scrum were absolutely destroyed by the Poms, we looked like a second tier nation. The only shining light was the back line, who again fought with such tenacity to keep the Wallabies in the game they are really world class. We are going back to the bad old days such as the 1969 Wallaby Tour of South Africa where the scrum was so obliterated that the South African crowd would stand and cheer each 20-metre shunt by the Bok pack. In those dark days it was again the brave Wallaby backs who tackled and run with such bravery to keep the score low.

I don’t blame Baxter or Dunning, this is the best Eddie Jones had to pick from, if he had any other option he would use it. Baxter and Dunning were considered the best props available and hence they were selected. Eddie is going to give Holmes and Fitter a run this weekend; they could do all right as Ireland are not flash. I won’t be surprised though if again the Aussie scrum is on roller skates as this is a very inexperienced front row. You must remember it takes eight forwards to make a scrum work and though the front rowers are copping all the blame, there is not much happening behind them as well. The Australian scrum is generating no power at all at the engagement, England were knocking them a step back on the hit. It takes eight players to tango in the scrum as they say.

I saw about half of the Irish Test and it really was a low standard match. I got the Irish commentary and it was quite funny, if you thought the Wallabies were copping it from the press, the Irish were really getting the knives into their own team.

I was interested to read Nick Farr Jones’s article saying that the Sydney University tight five should be picked for the Wallabies. I have the utmost respect for Nick he is a champion but I would suggest he is not a great judge of the tight five. Sydney University First Grade is a good standard but light years away from Test Match standard. In the Wales game on the weekend David Fitter was destroyed by the Welsh loosehead. The unheralded Welsh Tight Head Prop Horseman absolutely destroyed Matt Dunning, which was no surprise, I watched Horseman dish up Os du Randt the week before.

Why have we reached such a low ebb in Australian Rugby? Where have all the mongrel forwards gone? It is a complex problem that has a number of causes and will also need a number of solutions. Australia has a very small player base compared to the other first tier countries, people just don’t realise how small the game is in Australia. I was flying back to Singapore from Sydney on the weekend, sitting next to a couple of young blokes from Melbourne going onto London to work in a pub. They looked like likely lads the only problem was that they were AFL players; they were looking forward to playing some Village Rugby Union in England. They knew there would be no AFL in England and were keen to give Rugby a go for the first time. Unfortunately this is the case across most of Australia, these fit young blokes are playing AFL and other sports and not Rugby. If they were Kiwis or South Africans they would all be Rugby players.

We have a small player base to start with in Australia so when the structure is wrong it may take a while to reach the top of the game but when it does it is very hard to correct. The reality of club rugby in Australia is that there is only one club competition that is worthwhile and that is Sydney. Brisbane has sunk to a very low standard and now the Reds are finding it hard to find players to step up to Super 14 level because of the low standard club competition. So Sydney is powering Australian Rugby and providing 70% of the contracted players to the four Super 14 provinces. The Wallabies need a wider base; it is extremely urgent that something is done about the Brisbane Club Competition it can’t be allowed to slide any further.

The poor state of the Brisbane Club Competition is in itself a complex problem. The QRU can be blamed for letting the Brisbane Club Comp originally fall into decline but it is definitely market forces keeping it there. It is a very sad state of affairs with most of the Rugby Clubs licenced clubs either in receivership or closed altogether. Brisbane Clubs can simply not get sponsorship, if you are a sponsor with 50K why put it into a Brisbane Rugby Club when you can put it into one of the Brisbane national sporting franchises such as the Reds, Bullets or Bears and get a good return. Contrast this to Sydney where there are a number of Premier Clubs with 100K or more sponsorship.

It is a vicious cycle in Brisbane with 20 people and a couple of dogs attending club games, no interest from sponsors because of the poor product, good players leaving because the standard is low and no money to attract or keep them there. The biggest contributor to this vicious cycle has been the QRU allowing Super 12 players to miss club games because of a variety of excuses. Contrast this to Sydney where the Super 12 players have always been cycled back into the club competition if they were not required by the Wallabies. This has meant that there has been great interest from spectators and sponsors in sharp contrast to Brisbane with no interest at all by spectators or sponsors in the club competition.

The decline of forward technique in Australia is also a complex problem with a number of contributing factors. I attended my Australian Schoolboys 20 year reunion last weekend and the decline of the Wallabies was the hot topic of conversation. Brian Short our coach on the tour reminded us that the current state of the Wallabies was in sharp contrast to our era. We played a Graham Henry coached New Zealand Schoolboys team in 1985 at Ballymore and beat them by 20 points and scored 2 pushover tries. We then went on to tour Europe and dominated up front in our 15 tour matches, we scored 451 points and only had 2 tries scored against us. I hate to say it but I think the Australian Schoolboys who left last week for the UK will most probably mirror the Wallabies in that they will get belted up front by the bigger and more technically able UK forwards.

This is the root of the problem technical inept forwards at schoolboy, club, Super 12 and National level. No one knows how to do a rolling maul or pack a scrum anymore. It starts at school level and Craig Harley one of our 1985 Aussie Schoolboy flankers gives a good insight “As a school coach you pick 4 backrowers with one playing at loosehead prop, the depowered scrum means you pick a fast guy at loosehead he doesn’t have to be able to scrum”. The depowered scrum is not to blame, I think it is good for rugby and has reduced injury; unfortunately Australia and New Zealand are the only countries that play these strict laws. I believe the coaches are to blame, they pick the easy option of not doing scrums at training and picking a flanker at loosehead, you can still have a dominate scrum even though you can only push 1.5 metres. The problem is that you have to put time into at training and you don’t get an immediate return. (This paragraph was not meant to knife my mate Harls, well not much anyway Ha Ha)

This is very much a contributing factor to poor forward play in Australia. When I left on the Australian Schools Tour in 1985 I knew how to wheel, counter wheel, bunch the hooker, 8 man drive and counter, engage with power, double team the loosehead and so on and so on. I had all the power scrummage basics down pat, unfortunately my counterpart 20 years on who left last week knows none of these techniques and he will get belted in the scrums in the UK. This prop will then get to club level and not learn much, make it to Super 12 and not learn much and then become a Wallaby and get pushed all around the park like this year.

The Super 12 is also a contributing factor to the downgrading of Australian forward technique. Since the introduction of the Super 12 we have seen the disappearance of power forward play in Australia. I played two years of Super 12 and the emphasise was on recycling the ball and defence, we did very little scrums at training and the much vaunted Queensland rolling maul disappeared into history. Unfortunately all levels of Rugby picked this up in Australia with club and school coaches mirroring this pattern. Super 12 supremos would put out stats like; this Super 12 game was excellent as only 5 scrums were packed and there were only 12 lineouts, great for TV. How the Northern Hemisphere laughed at us, they continued to pack their 30 scrums a game and throw plenty of lineouts. This gradual erosion of Southern Hemisphere forward play culminated in England being the first Northern Hemisphere team to win the World Cup in 2003.

Graham Henry is very astute; he observed this decline of tight forward play in the Southern Hemisphere whilst coaching in the UK. The All Blacks would have been just as bad as the Wallabies in the UK if not for Graham Henry. I will never forget that weekend in June 2003 when the All Blacks played France in Christchurch and Australia played England in Melbourne. The All Blacks were driven all around the park by the French pack, the All Black scrum demolished. The scene was repeated in Melbourne with the Wallaby pack brushed aside by the big English forwards. Henry certainly set his plans in motion and the results can be seen in the current All Black team. They were very dominant up front in their recent Grand Slam success. Henry has demanded that all Super 12 franchises concentrate on the set pieces at training and the All Black training has also involved a lot of set piece training like the old days.

So there you go Australian Rugby is easy to fix, resurrect the Brisbane Club Competition and make every Rugby Coach in Australia vow to do 2 hours of scrum and rolling maul training each week. On another note I have been very worried about my two regulars on the message board Dave and Bruce, they are taking the demise of the Wallabies hard and I am hoping they are not thinking about self-harm or anything. At least they are still chatting about wresting so they may pull through.
Regards to all the gang in Coffs Harbour, William tells me that the world famous Stormin Norman has an interest in goat farming. I did not know that Norm was a farmer, he told me that he would treat the goats the same as they do on the island of Kadavu, very cryptic.