There are several things one should expect to encounter in trial matches before the season proper. Some things will change, some remain, and the legitimacy and relevance of the result will always be questioned.
So too it was in Geelong last night, where the Melbourne Rebels welcomed both their home province and the Waikato Chiefs back to Super Rugby for the first time in 2012.
For the home side, the night was meant to be all about change. They welcomed a new leader, with new vice-captain Hugh Pyle taking up the role filled last season by Gareth Delve, as well as standing in for absent captain Stirling Mortlock.
Several players were making their debut for the navy blues, not least Wallabies James O’Connor and Kurtley Beale. Add in Damien Hill taking the reins of a notably different coaching staff for the first time, and the Rebels of 2012 were barely recognisable as the team who brought rugby to Victoria the year previously.
Change was noticeable in the way the Rebels played, as well. Early in the match, Melbourne played with a strong and structured attack, and were able to force the visitors into mistakes with relative ease. This facet of the game was a lot more, let’s say, ‘free-form’, in the club’s preceding season.
Beale and O’Connor were electric in how they handled their opportunities with the ball, and will no doubt prove a good influence on their colleagues going forward. The skills and confidence of first-year players have risen, Cooper Vuna in particular a standout. Also, the one-on-one defence of most players has improved markedly, with the forward pack stopping several attacking breaks from their opponents.
Unfortunately for the Rebels, too many things remained the same. While individual defence has improved, as a line they were still too slow to get back when the Chiefs won the ball.
The backline struggled with defending inside their last 10m, the Chiefs’ attacking play from a rolling maul directly responsible for three of their six tries. Most telling from the Rebels’ performance, they still could not convert whatever attacking pressure they mustered into points.
This is to take nothing away from the Chiefs, who played brilliant football with a much more settled line-up than the Rebels, who fielded four different teams, one in each quarter. The visitors’ pressure in defence was at fever pitch almost all night, and as the game rolled on, they were able to turn the most innocent of Melbourne errors into a scoring chance.
It was a sublime performance from a very well-prepared team, tempered only by Aaron Cruden’s continued lack of form in front of goal.
So, how much can we read into the Rebels’ first excursion to the Cattery? Damien Hill was disappointed but pensive in his reaction to the game, saying ”We haven’t spoken about winning or losing in these trial matches, we’ve got 36 players to trial through…To have six tries scored against you in any game is not what you are after and some aspects of our attack and defence that we wanted to trial didn’t work out.”
O’Connor was more direct in his dismissal of the game’s result, stating simply that “It’s a trial game. We would have liked to have done better, but we’re not reading anything into it.”
Indeed, it’s hard to truly identify what we’ll see from Melbourne from the game in Geelong. There are noticeable improvements in the side, and they will benefit from settling on a line-up sooner rather than later, but a better defensive effort will be required from the Rebels if they are to truly make an impact on the Australian conference in 2012.
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