Woeful woeful Wallabies, lion-hearted Lions

Am I the only one apart from Bob Dwyer who thinks the Lions were cheats?

Jerry @5.32pm. Interesting.I think our referees tend to be more over-zealous on the home team than the opposition,so they basically wouldn't be seen as being biased. Just a theory.

9 Genia (White) 10 CL (Cooper) 11 Speight 12 Godwin 13 Chris Sautia (Kurindrani) 14 Folau 15 Mogg

Glen Innis ABs record against Aus. and other nations with far superior player resources would tend to contradict your argument.

He baulked because Genia over called him........

Ben How do you know that most of the Australian numbers are not just a bunch of fat baby boomers strolling around golden oldies park games.Qualitive figures are impossible to get so I will stick with the raw numbers.The lions have now played Australia 23 times and won 17 of those encounters and given the advantage they have in playing numbers so they bloodywell should. Playing niumbers don't matter, remember England used to dominate Australia at Rugby Leagur up until the mid sixties but our population was much smaller then, whilst the League playing areas of England have actually slightly shrunk in numbers over the past half century.Rugby in Australia is a minority game played in two states - most of our elite are harvested from a couple of dozen schools, I actually think we box well above our weight at the sport.

Yes we do. IRB statistics show that Aus. has more than twice as many registered rugby players and senior male players than NZ. England has nearly 3 times our player base in both categories. Don't know where you got your stats. from but they are complete rubbish.

Gees, thanks Jerry :D

Richard - funnily enough NZ have done better in NZ with neutral refs than they did with NZ refs back in the day.

Leigh halfpenney may be the best rugby playing back among the worlds worst rugby teams but its a nonsense notion, and one which comes easily to Lord. He is a very good player and not hard to pick in this series because their were few, An average game write up though because although Oz were poor they were right in the game ten minutes after half time. Pseudo experts like Lord missed all that. Then the Lions played some 100 minute overdue rugby for half an hour. Good for the Oz economy, and the whiners, the cooper lovers and deans haters. And the rest of us couldn't give two hoots.

Unless you were a competent judge of rugby, in which case you would come to a different conclusion.

He was poor, but he was getting a little better as the series progressed; possibly to the point where you might chance him for a run off the bench - in a Sydney club game.

Yes, sometimes Cooper manages to draw and pass successfully. Sometimes. And far less so at test level than at S15. Lets not go putting on the rose-coloured glasses about past Wallaby performances by any player. And one problem we have to deal with in Cooper is that the All Blacks are confident after RWC 2011 that they have worked him out. His few test appearances since then appear to support that. "It is due to hwo JoC ran the ball, the angles, and poor passing game that he did not manage to put more players into spaces." Sorry Peter but this bears no relationship to what actually happened in the game. "Cooper by standing flatter, passing better, running and drawing would of put far more players into gaps." Even if this were true, so what? My point was that O'Connor didn't actually have a bad game last night. But you seem determined to make wild assertions that he was the worst 10 ever to strap on boots, simply to bolster your fantasies about what your hero Cooper would have done if he had played. "Cooper is the only one who has managed to get players into space outside this rushing defence" Are you referring to the Reds Lions game? Do be serious - that was nothing like the intensity of last night, particularly concerning the pressure exerted by the Lions forwards on our halves. There is simply no comparison. If you want Cooper to be Wallabies No 10 be my guest - I would have had no objection to him playing - but spare me the paeans of godlike praise for his abilities. My point has simply been that O'Connor didn't actually have a bad game as fly half on Saturday night, despite some of the bizarre comments made on the Roar about him. "The reds scrum was just as smashed by the lions in that game." Not remotely.

Isn't it arguable that its "decades"? I know what you mean: You can draw a line at say 2003 when Bill Young was at his best, and then things started to go downhill after that. But its not like we didn't have scrum problems before that.

Thank you Fernando. I felt the same watching the scrum calls - incomprehensible. "A major flaw of the WB’s, is that the captain never spoke with the referee." True, or the half back could do it, but you are correct that someone has to be in the ref's ear. One of our greatest half backs, George Gregan, was renowned for the way he constantly spoke to the referee in order to ensure that our pack was not disadvantaged. Anyway, best luck to you chaps in the 4N. See you soon.

BRTD, that is not what I saw. Robinson's packing was exactly what you would expect from a world class scrummager with many years of experience and successful scrummaging at test level. Alexander was not to the same standard, but the number and severity of penalty calls are inexplicable, even after reviewing several times. It is still not clear to me in some cases how there was any infringement at all - Poite loves to look decisive, when a better referee would realise he cannot easily determine fault, and simply re-set the scrum. Poite has form for this sort of thing. He is a referee who does not like to think about what is going on in front of him (and probably does not understand it). Rather, he decides that one scrum is the stronger (which it was) and that therefore every time there is a problem, the other pack must be to blame (which is hogwash). The two referees before Poite had shown how it should be done. By looking at each scrum on its own merits they found that in some cases it was our pack that prevailed (and equally that in some cases no-one was to blame when a scrum needed to be re-set). And Alexander's sending was a joke. There was simply no basis for taking such drastic action. But it was consistent with Poite's trigger-happy attitude. It didn't cost us the game of course - bad defence letting in four tries, none of which were really unstoppable, did that quite well on its own.

I'm not defending Dean's I wouldn't be qualified to comment on his abilities as a coach as I don't know enough about the game,although I do enjoy watching it at international level.The point I am making is that the lions now have a 17 - 6 win record over Australia so losing to them is the rule rather than the exception and given the difference in playing numbers that is about what one would expect, Rugby in Australia is a minority sport played mainly in two states and harvests most of it's players from a couple of dozen schools,I thik we actually box above our weight in test Rugby all things considered.

Robinson is a good LHP prop but anyone who says Alexander is the best in the world is completely stark raving mad.

graham, I have looked all over this article and cant see your original post. This colourful uniform with cut down boots you wore, was this to a parade?

So according to David's criteria in judging SOO 2, this game must have been even more boring/fizzer/non-event? Of course it was.