Deans brings back Campo. Good!

 
Spiro Zavos Columnist

By , 30 Aug 2008 Spiro Zavos is a Roar Expert

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Australian rugby legend David Campese in action at Hong Kong Sevens 1998. AAP Photos

A disgraceful act of spite by senior Wallabies (read George Gregan, particularly) took place last year when they refused to allow David Campese to hand out the Wallaby jerseys to the players before the Test against the Springboks at Cape Town.

Campese, along with many other rugby writers (including myself), had argued for some time that Gregan was more of an impediment to the success of the Wallabies than a guarantor of victory.

When Gregan came into the Wallabies in the early 1990s he was a running halfback with some flair in his play.

I remember writing him up after seeing him on television starring in the Hong Kong.

As his career progressed, he became more noted for his defensive work, which included the memorable tackle on Jeff Wilson, ‘Gregan’s Tackle’, that won a Test for the Wallabies against the All Blacks in Sydney.

But he stayed on too long.

And he seemed to be resistant to new blood being introduced as his successor, both at the ACT Brumbies and at the Wallabies.

In the end, at the 2007 Rugby World Cup, he ended up a caricature of the dynamic player he was a decade early. He stood over the ball as if he were an emperor penguin waiting for it to hatch.

Gregan had some revenge on Campese for his calls that the emperor halfback had no clothes by thwarting the jersey presentation, and stating in his just-released rugbiography that Campese had such frail defensive skills and a lack of pace and strength that he wouldn’t have made it in the professional era.

This is arrant nonsense.

Campese would have been devastating in the professional game, especially under the ELVs. There has never been a better broken field runner in the history of rugby.

The claims about his lack of defensive skills have never really held up. There was not one winger in his long career who ever had the wood on him. His game wasn’t based around defence, but Don Bradman’s game wasn’t based around bowling.

Alan Jones called Campese, “The Bradman of Australian Rugby.” This is an apt and fair description of Australia’s greatest winger.

An All Black selector and coach once told me that when they were preparing to play the Wallabies in the Campese era, he was the only player who they had to work out and practice specific plans and systems to try and keep him – generally unsuccessfully – in check.

The Gregan-Campese spat has a happy ending for Australian rugby. Earlier this week Robbie Deans asked Campese to hand out the jerseys to the Wallabies in a ceremony that took place before the team traveled to Johannesburg for the crucial Tri-Nations Test.

Forever on the front foot, on and off the field, the great Campo allowed himself a counter-attack against Gregan and his comments: “You can sense there is a real change in the atmosphere of the Wallabies this year, a more relaxed feeling … The burdens have been lifted off the players and they are enjoying their rugby. There’s no baggage.”

I reckon George Gregan has been tackled ball and all.

And that David Campese has picked up the ball and scooted away for a long-range try.

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