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Right then. It’s here. The Rugby World Cup kicks off Saturday morning Australian time, with the Wallabies’ first outing in the very early hours of next Thursday morning.
Finally, we can stop the guesswork and speculation; I suspect the team that plays Fiji will be the best team the Michael Cheika has named all year.
And what a year of guesswork and speculation it’s been. I have no idea, but I would hazard a guess that the number of Wallabies Rugby World Cup squad-related comments on the site in 2015 would be in the very high tens of thousands; maybe even six figures.
More in our ‘Get behind the Wallabies’ series:
>> PART 1: Enough fighting already
>> PART 3: How the Wallabies can win the Rugby World Cup
Indeed, my first crack at naming a squad netted 279 comments and nearly 9000 page reads. On January 2. And it’s fair to say it has dominated debate ever since; even three non-country specific Rugby World Cup questions last Friday was initially taken over by yet more discussion about the Wallabies halves, and that debate was being had on January 2 as well.
Either a lot of you have no trouble saying the same thing repeatedly, or there’s been a lot of backflipping going on over the last nine-and-a-bit months.
(For what it’s worth, I got 22 of the 31 correct back on January 2, but that was before the foreign player allowance had been made. But I also had Saia Fainga’a, Matt Hodgson, and James O’Connor.)
So where am I going with this, you might rightly ask?
Well, I reckon we’ve been putting up for so long now that it’s time to shut up.
The squad was picked four weeks ago, and the blueprint for the opening games against Fiji (1:45am AEST, September 24) and Uruguay (9:00pm AEST, September 27) has now been laid out. Two different XVs will be picked and prepared specifically for those games.
So I reckon it’s just time to get on with it.
Michael Cheika’s shown himself to be a man who won’t divert from the way forward he’s devised for the Wallabies for this campaign, and there’s certainly nothing I can say in the next week or so to change that.
Cheika will metaphorically live and die by his results this Rugby World Cup, and he has, bar one measly little hiccup in Auckland, achieved good results thus far in 2015. He’s given every player he’s wanted to look at an opportunity, with adjustments and selections made accordingly.
One area of selection that I think has Australia well placed is with the six backrowers. The selection of Scott Fardy, Michael Hooper, David Pocock, Ben McCalman, Sean McMahon and Wycliff Palu brings the right mix of work ethic, energy and physicality.
You would expect the six would be divided in 6-7-8 combinations in the order I’ve named them there for the first two games, and both loose trios look pretty well equipped to play the way Cheika seems to like his backrows to operate.
Fardy and McCalman are almost interchangeable, and both provide a really strong workrate all round the park. Fardy is probably better over the ball, but McCalman is probably the more solid defender. Both carry well, albeit McCalman probably doesn’t have the offload game Fardy does. Both are good lineout options, and while Fardy provides cover at lock, McCalman is equally home at No.8.
Hooper and McMahon, I’m sure, share the same recharging station. Both play that hi-octane, up-tempo game of excellent defence and carrying with more physicality than they should possess.
And sure, neither of them pull the same number of pilfers as Pocock or as Richie McCaw did in his prime, but let’s be honest here, who does? Moreover, Cheika has shown over the years that you can build a successful backrow combination without the ball-thieving opensider.
Pocock and Palu as No.8s are about as similar as gum trees and tasty cheese. Palu, even at this stage of his career, plays pretty much as you expect a No.8 will; straight out of the mould. Pocock just plays his natural game while wearing ‘8’ on his back, and packs into the back of the scrum to even up his cauliflower ears.
Yet when put into their respective backrow combinations, both Palu and Pocock fit very comfortably and easily.
Pocock is carrying a lot stronger in 2015, pilfers as well as ever, and thus fits in well with Hooper’s natural running and tackling game, and Fardy’s natural workhorse game.
Palu, even if he’s not carrying as much as he once did, gives that strong central physicality for McMahon’s kamikaze and McCalman’s tradesman-like to work with.
On January 2, I’d have said you were lacking sense if you’d suggested these two combinations as Rugby World Cup backrow trios. But that just shows the different way Cheika thinks, and how it’s just crazy enough to work.
A week out, I think it’s time to let the coach have his way. The time for the hand-wringing and desk-thumping is over; it’s time to back the Wallabies’ selections.