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Wallabies star reveals comeback plan, wants unique skills of rugby protected amidst law variations

28th February, 2023
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28th February, 2023
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Wallabies flyer Andrew Kellaway is targeting a round five return against the Reds as his comeback game from injury.

The Melbourne Rebels star suffered a fractured foot on the Spring Tour playing against Ireland.

“Hopefully, four weeks,” Kellaway said on The Roar Rugby Podcast when asked about his return date.

“I reckon it’s probably an accurate estimate. I ran all last week, and today got up to some some good speeds,” he said Monday. “I hit eight and a half metres a second. Nine metres a second, if you get up to that in the game you’re doing all right.

“So the speed’s coming back now, it’s just about making sure that I’m fit enough and building a bit of resilience. That gets me back for either the Reds or the Drua and I’m hoping to get a little bit of time under my belt before I have to go to Fiji and deal with that storm.”

Kellaway was outspoken on the subject matter of the new law variations, especially around the scrum, when they were first mooted last year.

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Now after a round of Super Rugby with mechanisms in place to help speed up the game, he was adamant that the game needed to make sure it didn’t lose its “uniqueness”.

“In the case of the scrum a lot of these guys have learned this stuff over a really long period of time,” said Kellaway.

“And that’s not to say they can’t do it faster. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying we’re talking about habits here so it must be a really difficult thing for them to do to have to have to speed all of that up.

“I’d love to see us celebrate the intricacies of our game, the niche parts like lineouts and scrums rather than try and change them to suit everybody.

“I think these are so unique to our game. There is no other game that has these requirements of players that are so unique, and so skill based.”

Kellaway’s teammate Ryan Louwrens was pinged for being too slow to clear the ball from a breakdown in the loss to the Force on Saturday night in one clear example of the new laws.

“He said he knew he had to speed up he just, he never had to do it before,” said Kellaway. “So he didn’t really know what that felt like. And these are probably the teething issues we’re going to have to deal with. And if it makes the game more attractive then then long may it reign.”

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Kellaway was asked if there was a law variation he’d like to see.

“Get rid of the ref’s whistle maybe?” he laughed. “Just joking. The refs are great!

“It’s not really a tweak, but maybe I’d love to see the refs have a bit more autonomy around the ability to say, for example, if the scrum collapses, but the ball is there to just play.

“The same applies to the breakdown, same philosophy, the ability to say, ‘hey, this actually doesn’t affect anything. Let’s let it roll’. But I think that’s a pretty hard tweak to make because we’re talking about going back into the gray when everything seems to be going we need to be more black and white.”

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