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Rugby fans are right to be concerned with the direction the Wallabies are heading under Dave Rennie. I happen to think he’s on the right track.
He has been hampered by injuries to key world class players in key positions but for me it’s more than that.
People might think I’m crazy saying this, but I like the way that they’re playing the game.
There are glimpses and moments in there where if they can build on them and find consistency, not only within games, but in backing things up, I genuinely think that they can build nicely into the World Cup.
That might sound stupid to a lot of people, I’m happy to admit that, but I like how he sees the game and how he wants to play the game.
Other teams who are playing well, like Ireland and New Zealand, play with a lot of structure and a lot of detail and within that they add some nice variety.
Having spoken to a lot of players within that Wallabies setup, I think it’s a good game style that they’re trying to master and get their heads around.
We’ve seen games where they’ve played exceptionally well and where they’ve put it all together and have created opportunities. Even in games we’ve lost – the England series for example – we created so many opportunities off the back of really, really good play. We’ve just got to be able to take advantage of it and finish them.
(Photo by Morgan Hancock/Getty Images)
I’m not sure why there is so much inconsistency but I like what I’m seeing and hopefully the key players that come back – Quade Cooper, Samu Kerevi and Michael Hooper – can make a difference to building that consistency.
As Dave has acknowledged, discipline is a problem for them at the moment. And as he said after the Bledisloe Cup match, may selection is the answer to that.
I remember one season when I was at the Reds, we were having discipline issues with giving away far too many penalties. Our coach, Ewen McKenzie, printed out a sheet and would post it on the wall outside the team room every week.
It was a list of penalties that we each individually given away and it was colour coded. Green was a referee’s decision that we can take either way, yellow was where you might be in the wrong. Red was the individual’s responsibility – a poor play that gave away a cheap penalty. If you got to a certain number of penalties, you wouldn’t get picked. Each player had to be accountable to his teammates.
No one wanted to let their teammates down, so it helped us tidy up that area of our game.
Inconsistency is a tougher issue to solve and was a big problem during The Rugby Championship.
That was a problem when I was playing for Australia as well. We’d play well one week and poorly the next and we were never able to back it up.
Looking for positives, Pete Samu has been brilliant the last couple of weeks.
From an athletic perspective, he’s such a specimen. He’s a big body, strong in the carry, strong in defence, with a great ability to be able to get over the ball and pilfer. That’s a strength I wasn’t aware he had. He’s actually elite at it.
I like his dynamic ability in the carry which creates so many opportunities with either line breaks or half breaks or the offload.
He had been starting to be pigeon holed as a bench player, and while he would have been happy to play his role for the team, everybody wants to start and you can see that he’s taking his opportunity with two hands.
There was a huge void left by Michael Hooper not playing but he’s really stepped up. Fraser McReight was good for a couple of games but Pete’s taken it to another level.
(Photo by Kelly Defina/Getty Images)
There are going to be questions around whether Hoops does come straight back in because of how good Pete has been, but more so because of how good the balance of the back row is with him at No.7.
I think size matters more than ever at Test level. You need those big bodies to be able to win the collisions and then give you the opportunity to play off the front foot.
If I’m picking a team that’s going straight into the Spring Tour now I’m thinking Pete Samu at No.7.
One player who needs to take the next step is Jordan Petaia.
I’ve always thought he has the potential to be an absolute superstar in the game. But I think a lot of his opportunities are still getting given to him on the back of potential.
I’d love to see him fulfill that potential. I don’t know whether it’s a confidence thing, but he needs to start grasping his opportunities. He got given a good one on the weekend with Lalakai Foketi coming off with injury and he didn’t perform as well as he would have liked.
You can see glimpses of that superstar potential there. But Dave’s the type of coach, and James O’Connor found this out, that if you’re not taking opportunities and not playing well, he’s happy to just not pick you.
Another thing Dave said after the loss in Auckland has resonated with me: “The game takes forever to play because of TMO chipping in as well. It’s messy isn’t it? It’s not a great product.”
I’ve got a confession to make. I very rarely watch a game live anymore because of the impact the TMO is having on the sport.
That is the honest to God truth. I hate the stoppages. I watch rugby league games live because there’s so much more ball in play and there are fewer stoppages and it’s just a nice free-flowing game from that perspective.
The voices rising against TMO intervention are getting louder and louder, and I have thought this for a long time – the TMO has far too much of an influence on the game.
It’s disrupting the whole momentum of professional rugby – not only for the guys playing but for the people watching.
(Photo by David Rogers/Getty Images)
From an entertainment perspective and the product itself, I honestly feel like it’s killing the game.
Why not just have the TMO referee the game now and have someone with an earpiece out there on the field?
The decision with Mathieu Raynal and Bernard Foley I liked, because we saw a referee with the courage to referee the game out on the field.
We must start allowing the referees to have more discretion in terms of their interpretation.
Human beings are all different. We all see and perceive the world in different ways and understand things differently. So obviously, referees are going to interpret things differently in terms of their decision-making.
We’ve just got to live with it – the good and bad of the game.
I would much rather play in a game where referees make poor decisions but there’s good flow and fewer stoppages, and I’d rather watch one like that than have the TMO coming in all the time.
I hate watching games like that when they want to keep going back to check minor play. I hate it. I get it for foul play, malicious and dangerous play, but all these other innocuous incidents? Let the ref referee the game.
The strongest voices who are against it are people who understand it best – coaches and players. Anyone sitting at home can watch and be ‘oh, well I’d rather have the right decision’. But there’s got to be a feel for the game and that’s gone.