RedsHappy
Tony Shaw (54)
For me, that's a key insight and a truth of many of the Deans-coached wins.
We have some terrifically talented players in Australia, and most at the elite level are powered by a genuine Aussie-pride rooted passion to work hard when the chips are down, and win games and trophies. That talent-aggression-passion foundation can survive quite a degree of managerial mis-allocation and misuse. I believe the syndrome of high talent and 'individual brilliance' overcoming coaching oddities and deficiencies has much history in Australian rugby and I essentially believe a large quantum of recent Wallaby wins are in this broad category.
I think of, for example, E Jones' unspectacular coaching record and uninspiring coaching style, and yet the Wallabies of 2003 did wonderfully well to get into the RWC Final that year. I think of the Hickey-coached Waratahs - it's more obvious than ever that he did not extract the consistent best outcomes or attractive playing styles from, for example, the 2011 Tahs but they still got into the final 6 that year and the year before, scraping along unglamorously, but winning enough to get there. The Tahs have and have had some really wonderful players, it was the sick culture of the NSW and Tahs RU as recently combined with a kind of strangling, stats-driven, low-risk coaching method that held them back for so long. So often in the professional era, intrinsic Australian rugby talent has been ruined or at best held back as our managerial and coaching elites remained as rank amateurs at core but gained for themselves new financial rewards, and thus let our national or regional talent pool down, and badly. NZ and the NZ RU did not make these fatally unbalanced transitions, they knew they had to professionalise their management and coaching resources in parallel with that of their players and this better standard of total systemic skill is one of the major reasons a country of 4+m people can dominate a world sport.
We've had elements of evidence of good national coaching in recent years. For example, the excellent work of P Blake on the Wallabies defence from late 2010 and through 2011 laid a down a very good platform of defensive skill for the 2012 Wallabies. IMO a return to the historically high standard of Wallaby defence (which had drifted markedly downwards in the 2009-10 period) was a bedrock of the very narrow 2012 Wales wins, the draw with the ABs at Suncorp, etc. Equally, there were glimpses of evidence that Totality Tony and Blades may be bringing greater accuracy and intensity to our breakdown work and in the scrum, not always, but often enough to give a bit of confidence that these new support coaches were adding some tangible value. It was impressive just how much talent we had when the 2012 rookies and second and third Wallaby choices stood up and often delivered in Tests. In this, we could see that the 'oh, we have huge problems with depth' excuse might just be a myth, and the problems with our whole rugby system might lie elsewhere.
But in none of the 2012 wins did we see solid or sustained evidence of, for example, well-worked attacking game plans, well-rehearsed ensemble tries off set-piece or any great semblance of holistic coaching excellence that generated broad fan excitement or a real sense that 'wow, the Wallabies are back, let's go back and see them again and again'. (And FFS don't tell me that can't be done any more: in a short period, it was achieved at the modern Reds, and it's gradually re-emerging at the 2013 Tahs.) The fact that only two home Tests sold out in 2012 reflected that, and what had gone before. Our best work as a team last year was probably the win over England. In my view, a la the E Jones and Hickeys, it's core talent and attitude that is fundamentally getting us through series and providing enough scrappy wins to avoid humiliation or sequential disasters.
FWIW, I think this is just what will happen in the BIL series. We will possess greater aggregate athletic and rugby skill, yet we will have flawed game plans, odd untried combinations, and little back line ingenuity, and the former's value will just exceed the defects of the latter, and we will win at least one Test as a direct result. History will confirm if this is enough to win two, but it just might be as our men will be hugely motivated as will the $200 per average ticket paying crowds. The nation will like the series win if so, but not a great number of new fans will be back in 2014.
Some here argue that this is Test rugby, and this is enough, but it's not because my sense is that the majority of us have this angry, very angry, sense that our national rugby talent and potential is somehow chronically separated from its fulfilment and that, as a rugby nation, we are are capable of far more than we are realising. Australians have never liked or accepted that in our big sports, and long may that spirit run, it's a kind of cultural asset that I'm proud of.
), I'm pretty confident in english, but I just can't catch the words he said in the end.
