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Joined February 2016
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Go the mighty Highlanders
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The hubris exhibited by McLennan is truly amazing. One week he is telling critics not to watch if they don’t like it, the next crying crocodile tears about fans leaving the Wales game early–essentially taking his earlier advice. He claims that supporting the game at the grass roots is one of the 3 priorities to fix Australian Rugby but has overseen the squandering of what few resources RA has on recruiting a young player from the NRL and paying out coaching contracts and creating another financial liability in giving Jones a 5 year contract.
Typically when there is a changing of the guard at the top as there was with the replacement of Dave Rennie, those responsible for the decision reinforce their decisions by trashing the work of the person who has been replaced. In this case it involved the replacement of a number of experienced players in the Wallabies squad for no fault of their own, but simply to prove the wisdom of the replacement decision. Enough has been written about the decisions around fly-half and to a degree around the omission of Michael Hooper which was a major blunder mad evident in the Fiji game if it had not been evident beforehand. What has not been given the attention it should have has been the treatment of the most experienced player in the squad that was chosen–James Slipper on two counts.
First the appointment of Dave Pilecki as captain in this pressure cauldron when there was a ready experienced captain available in Slipper is inexplicable other than on the basis that Slipper had been captain under Rennie. Pilecki is a very good player who did not need the added pressure of captaincy in these circumstances. It affected his game. How he could deal with the impact of the no jump lineout and his role in that turning point in the game from a leadership point of view is difficult to fathom. At that point the leadership of a wise head was absolutely crucial. While it was problematic in the context of the game the Wallabies were still in the contest and at half time down 16-6 all was not lost.
In the first half Slippers Welsh opposite had attempted to lift Slipper in the scrum on a number of occasions only to be demolished by Slipper earning the Wallabies a couple of scrum penalties. The wallabies more than held their own in the scrums in the first half. Why on earth was Slipper replaced by “youth” at half time. Immediately the Welsh prop who had been tamed by Slipper became successful in popping his new opposite and our scrum was destroyed for the rest of the game. At every level the decision to replace Slipper was a disaster. The Psychological impact on the forward pack of having its scrum dominated should not be underestimated. Once Slipper was gone (with the bulk of the teams collective experience) the game was over. It was more of the same unfortunately, tied up with the justification of the undoing of anything Rennie had done.
Its amazing to see how quickly the narrative has changed from replacing Rennie’s team with one that could win the 2023 world cup, to one of going with youth to build a platform for the 2027 event. The narrative about the value of this losing experience compared with the way in which Carter Gordon was removed from the starting 15 in the Welsh game is an indication of the extent of the reverse engineering of this glib response to the defeat we have just suffered.
Forget about blaming the players and even the coach. The change required immediately is the removal of McLennan.
'How did mighty Australian Rugby get to this': McLennan says he has 'no' regrets, outlines three areas to fix