England to whitewash Australia
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<blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="NTA" data-cid="588322" data-time="1465986028">
<div>
<p>So we've got no ball carriers in the second row who can't drop the fucking thing (Carter) or get isolated (Arnold), no grunt carriers in the back row, and are relying on the same game plan we used last time.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> :think:</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Put your money on England methinks.</p>
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</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>Two competing philosophies here; I think Chickadee wants to tire England.</p> -
<p>What about Dean Mumm? Not an out and out line out man but certainly no slouch. Got tons of experience too. Fit enough to go 80.</p>
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<blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="rotated" data-cid="588251" data-time="1465971930">
<div>
<p>Phenomenal write up, the only question would be what quantifies success for him?</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>Thank you Rotated, most generous of you.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="antipodean" data-cid="588265" data-time="1465974883">
<div>
<p>It would have to be Bledisloe and RWC</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>Wins are good, but so is one of those plan for the future thingys, typed up by Cheika and Larkham, promoted by the ARU and endorsed by the various unions and the five franchises.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Sir Henry, Steve Hansen and Wayne Smith have done all the good work in developing and proving such a thing in the 2011 World Cup. Further, Cheika can also read and implement innovations outlined in both "The All Blacks guide to being successful off the field" at ( <a data-ipb='nomediaparse' href='http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/active/10427619/The-All-Blacks-guide-to-being-successful-off-the-field.html'>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/active/10427619/The-All-Blacks-guide-to-being-successful-off-the-field.html</a> ) to find out how to flog them into improving their behavior; and "The long promised Grant Fox Interview" found right here at Silverfern, for free! ( <a data-ipb='nomediaparse' href='http://www.daimenhutchison.com/rugby/index.php/page/index.html//front-page/the-long-promised-grant-fox-interview-it-real-r1423'>http://www.daimenhutchison.com/rugby/index.php/page/index.html//front-page/the-long-promised-grant-fox-interview-it-real-r1423</a> ). None of this handful of things is unreasonable and they all work at a handy 92.72% under the current bloke.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>We need something more than a glossy "development pathways" press release, which is immediately equipped with three good blokes on $300,000 pa each to - well - talk about it. We also need something more sophisticated than an urgent call to League for a couple of $750,000 per annum backs who will each spend their first six weeks wearing 10, 12, 13, 11, 14 and 15 while their manager and St Leonards negotiates their best position for exposure of their brand. We've already tried those things and they've offered less than 60%.</p> -
<blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="Mick Gold Coast QLD" data-cid="588100" data-time="1465947317">
<div>..The media has been trying hard to talk up something which is unlikely to exist - Jones and Cheika are seven years apart in age, their Club careers overlapped by seven years but Jones was from the old guard. He was from Matraville High, public housing territory, and Cheika from Marcellan (Catholic) College - different cradles - and they lived in different parts of the district, Cheika among his Lebanese family milieu. When they ceased playing they went their quite different, separate ways. I doubt they were close and they certainly don't have any particular rivalry, as claimed by the scribes.</div>
</blockquote>
<p>Thanks Mick I got my faulty memories from an Australian newspaper article years and years ago.</p>
<p>I note there are articles calling them both friends but also potential sparring partners</p>
<p><a data-ipb='nomediaparse' href='http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-06/wallabies-coach-michael-cheika-avoiding-war-of-words-with-eddie/7480526'>http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-06/wallabies-coach-michael-cheika-avoiding-war-of-words-with-eddie/7480526</a></p>
<p><a data-ipb='nomediaparse' href='http://www.telegraph.co.uk/rugby-union/2016/06/01/england-coach-eddie-jones-says-beer-with-deceptive-michael-cheik/'>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/rugby-union/2016/06/01/england-coach-eddie-jones-says-beer-with-deceptive-michael-cheik/</a></p>
<p><a data-ipb='nomediaparse' href='http://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/rugby-union/cheika-relishing-battle-against-old-friend-eddie-jones/news-story/6bed0d3a0fc619ec3577eae9ead21aa3'>http://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/rugby-union/cheika-relishing-battle-against-old-friend-eddie-jones/news-story/6bed0d3a0fc619ec3577eae9ead21aa3</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>"“I’m a mate of Eddie’s so I can only speak highly of him. He’ll be a good fit for what’s required over here,†Cheika said."</p>
<p> </p>
<p>But I don't where I saw they bonded over both having 'ethnic' backgrounds and I am sure the article wasn't quoting them directly. So I'll take the articles with a pinch of Saxa salt.</p> -
<blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="Mick Gold Coast QLD" data-cid="588100" data-time="1465947317">
<div>
<p>These blokes share the background of a demanding apprenticeship and long career with the dominant Club of the pre-professional period. Randwick was the high seminary of the Club rugby religion, where one learned lifelong lessons that excellence and success are borne of unremitting discipline and application.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Eddie (56 years old) played 210 games for Randwick from '81 to '91, then went on with his career as a physical education and geography teacher and eventually school principal. He appeared in six grand finals and won four. His coaching career began in '94 (Randwick) and he has been at it all around the world ever since. He played at Randwick with John Maxwell, Simon Poidevin, Lloyd Walker, Tim Kava, Stu Rutherford, David Knox, early David Campese and the Ellas. I watched him trundle about throughout that period, small and 70 kg wringing wet, an ever present workhorse for the whole of every match, always on the ball, dirty, wearing thick ankle pads.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>He came under the guidance of the master coach, Bob Dwyer, a tremendously influential figure in the game; and of the excellent Club coaches Jeff Sayle and Alan Gaffney. Cheika spent more time with the latter two.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Bob Dwyer said of him some years ago <em>"When Eddie came on the scene at Randwick, he came with a group of talented players (the Ellas and Walker all from Matraville High) into a group of talented players. He had exposure to a superior level of performance. What's come of this is his unbelievable appetite for hard work, much to the consternation of those below him."</em> He was academically outstanding and is well summarised as a perfectionist. From Jones:</p>
<p> </p>
<p style="margin-left:40px;"><em>"Ian Chappell certainly influenced my thinking on sport," Jones wrote. "I have been lucky enough to coach a number of teams. I want the teams that I coach to be tough and uncompromising. I want them to play positive rugby. I want our team to play entertaining rugby that sets standards of play. And I want to make sure that our team and team-members are selfless in pursuit of excellence. These attributes are the attributes of Ian Chappell."</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Like many of his Club team mates he simultaneously studied and left rugby to go straight into an existing professional career. His father is Australian and his mother Japanese.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Greg Growden said of him:</p>
<p> </p>
<p style="margin-left:40px;"><em>"Eddie Jones can be difficult to work with. He is so fastidious, so demanding, so clinical, so deeply focused, so work orientated, he can incinerate those around him, especially if they are a bit sensitive. If you don't stand up to him, he can crush you."</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>From Glen Ella, who worked alongside Jones in Japan:</p>
<p> </p>
<p style="margin-left:40px;"><em>"I’d think: “Does this guy ever sleep?†We’d go for a coffee for some down-time and he’d start tearing up the sugar sachets to create back-lines."</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>I do believe Eddie over-analysed things as Wallaby coach - Matthew Burke said that in the 1990s <em>"we [the Wallabies] had two set moves we used ... now we walk out of team meetings with pages and pages of moves and tactics and analysis"</em>. Australian rugby politics brought him down (a given for every Wallaby coach) together with his personal style, abrasive relationship with ARU power brokers (who all kept their jobs) and poor results from the Wallabies (who all kept their jobs). I read he has learned much and mellowed somewhat in the past fifteen years, but not quite to the alarming <em>"every snowflake is unique and special"</em> level, praise be.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>He once tore into that outstanding flake, your Kwadie, after a typically dismal effort for the Reds at Suncorp earlier in his career, when he knew only accolades and that no fault ever landed at his door. Robbie Deans did the same some years later after a match against Argentina, but in more moderate <em>"Could have done better"</em> terms. The insolent little turd was so inflated by then that it became the catalyst for his sobbing that <em>"That Dins fella is tocix ... ummm ... togsik ... errr ... what my manager wrote here on this bit of paper"</em> which was the catalyst for that coach being given the shunt.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Cheika (49 years old) played in 286 games from '85 to '99, as captain from '97 to '99. The Club won eight premierships during that time. He had played Under 21 for Australia and toured Europe with NSW in '97. The middle years of his career, from '89 to '94, were spent playing in Europe. His coaching career commenced in '99 and he has coached continuously since in Europe, Randwick and at the Waratahs. His contemporaries at Randwick were Warwick Waugh, Phil Kearns, Tim Kelaher, later David Campese and Ewen McKenzie; and the No 8 mantle was passed from John Maxwell, one of the hardest, toughest Club men to play the game. One needed to be seriously good at the job to play in the Randwick forward pack, they were the standard by which others were measured - every man a confident, capable worker, mean, competitive and no bludgers, hunting as a single unit of automatons and, when injured, replaced by a second grader forged from the same steel.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Cheika was of the provocative mongrel type, combative, vigorous, able, always gobbing off, pushing the laws and pressing the referee.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>He enjoyed a blessed family upbringing. His late father had arrived as a typical post war migrant in 1950, dirt poor. His only contact was a Lebanese fruit shop owner, the father of Aussie Home Loans founder John Symond. He ended up with his own trading company working in foreign and Australian goods; an MBE for services to the Lebanese community and Lebanese Australian of the Year.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Michael Cheika was driven, ambitious and disciplined enough to forge his own way in the "rag trade" in Europe - and to become fluent in two more languages along the way (now he is studying Portugese, to bring his score to five) - and made his fortune when he sold his fashion distribution company. <em>(Cheika's background, nature, manner and wider family success replicates that of one of my sons in law in building construction, whose family village is the next one along, five miles from Cheika's in the mountains near the Syrian border)</em>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The media has been trying hard to talk up something which is unlikely to exist - Jones and Cheika are seven years apart in age, their Club careers overlapped by seven years but Jones was from the old guard. He was from Matraville High, public housing territory, and Cheika from Marcellan (Catholic) College - different cradles - and they lived in different parts of the district, Cheika among his Lebanese family milieu. When they ceased playing they went their quite different, separate ways. I doubt they were close and they certainly don't have any particular rivalry, as claimed by the scribes.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I have seen Eddie described as a "larrikin", which he certainly was not, and both as being unlucky to have not played for Australia. The journalists just make stuff up.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>With Randwick and Bob Dwyer as benefactors they would have played if they were good enough but they were not. There is no shame in that, they attained the highest level of which they were capable. Their experience mirrors that of League's greatest coaches - Warren Ryan, Jack Gibson and Wayne Bennett were competent club footballers who only got a sniff of State representation.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I have great respect for both of these fellows, faithful servants to rugby that they are. I believe Michael Cheika will succeed, not least because he put the ARU back in its box (when they needed him more than he needed them) and he enjoys the protection of the most powerful political faction in Sydney rugby. He needs to be around for some years to to do that. Eddie Jones will do well with England however he has seen his best days already and I don’t think his obsessive, demanding methods will sit well with modern player expectations into the future. Cheika is the modern coach.</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>I just wanted to say awesome post, the sort of reason this forum is the best rugby one out there. Fantastic from a Northern Hemisphere perspective to hear this kind of insight from Aus - I recently read an article on Jones from a BBC journo who had interviewed some of his old Randwick and Wallabies mates, but this shits all over it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>(Please tell me you didn't just copy-paste from somewhere!)</p> -
<blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="Catogrande" data-cid="588349" data-time="1465993859">
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<p>What about Dean Mumm? Not an out and out line out man but certainly no slouch. Got tons of experience too. Fit enough to go 80.</p>
</div>
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<p> </p>
<p>But generally a bit shit. </p> -
<p>We didn't notice a difference in the RWC final when Douglas went off with a busted ankle (?) and Mumm came on.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>lying</p> -
<p>First rate write ups Mick.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Without wanting to get into national stereotypes, Eddie Jones V1.0 - assuming he hasn't reinvented himself as Eddie 2.0 to be a Hansen-style coach, motivator, investigator, problem solver and father figure to players - may have worked such a treat with Japan because (i) Jones shared ancestry with most of the team and (ii) Japanese society seems to me to be generally industrious, well ordered, law abiding and deferential to authority. Basically I am saying the players probably shut up and did whatever Jones said they should, at maximum effort. He helped raise their game to unprecedented success - they beat Wales in 2013 (albeit a 2nd XV while the Lions tour was on), top 10 ranking, and then RWC 2015 - the mother of all upsets vs. the Boks and a dominant defeat of Samoa. Hell, Japan somehow even contained Luke Whitelock in 2013 in his cameo off the bench for the ABs.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>To me, the England players (plus players from most other Anglo and Latin societies in countries that play rugby seriously) don't seem to come from a society which has the characteristics of Japan (I'm not criticising these societies here) so long term it makes me wonder what happens to the team when results go pear-shaped, as they almost inevitably will, and Eddie's style goes under the microscope. The trick is for coaches to tune into whatever makes relatively pampered young men respond and perform.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I don't think young men in NZ come from a society that respects and responds to authority particularly naturally or successfully but the ABs organisation post John Mitchell has somehow bridged that gap. </p> -
<p>I think the other area the Wallabies need to focus on is their kicking game and option taking. Field kicking isn't always a strength under Cheika coached teams, they prefer to keep ball in hand, but if the defenses are up to it this can limit their options. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>There was a key moment in the game on Saturday, Wallabies were up 10-0 and humming, got a turnover on halfway, then Phipps put in a rubbish box kick/kick over the top from the turnover which went straight to an English player, which then a few phases later resulted in a penalty, 10-3 and the game changed from there. </p> -
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<blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="Provincial Stalwart" data-cid="588589" data-time="1466039260"><p>
I don't think young men in NZ come from a society that respects and responds to authority particularly naturally or successfully but the ABs organisation post John Mitchell has somehow bridged that gap.</p></blockquote>
<br>
Without overgeneralising this, my experience dealing with NZ young men with Samoan heritage is that they generally do. If there is a fa'amatai or chief around they are very respectful. If there is a grandparent around they listen.<br><br>
It was interesting reading when Tana was captain and the players with Samoan heritage would go out of their way for him. -
<blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="mariner4life" data-cid="588519" data-time="1466031896">
<div>
<p>But generally a bit shit. </p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>Thank you for this - I thought for a second I was the only one who didn't rate Mumm.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Just watch the last 15 minutes of the RWC final. There is a crucial knock on by Mumm and then the ABs don't give up the ball again for the next 6 minutes which helped kill off the Aussie comeback</p>
<p> </p>
<p>As soon as I saw him take the field in the final I quietly suspected it would be a crucial moment in the match. He is one Australian player who would be overlooked by many other countries except for the likes of Italy.</p> -
<p>I would be playing McCalman at number 8 instead of McMahon. I know McCalman is well tried and hasn't set the world alight at test level, but I think it will take a number of games for McMahon to learn the number 8 jersey from a set peice perspective and I would rather just have a solid player at 8 than gamble on McMahon doing some game changing line breaks.</p>
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<blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="hurricane" data-cid="588723" data-time="1466061774">
<div>
<p>He is one Australian player who would be overlooked by many other countries except for the likes of Italy.</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>Parisse light?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mumm's a poor lock, he just doesn't have the impact and plays too loose. Much better suited to a loose forward.</p> -
<blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="antipodean" data-cid="588727" data-time="1466062228">
<div>
<p>Parisse light?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mumm's a poor lock, he just doesn't have the impact and plays too loose. Much better suited to a loose forward.</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>He is frequently penalised as well. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Even though I try not to swear in my posts unless I am doing it to be a colourful I am starting to think the first poster (mariner) described him well enough when he said he's "a bit shit".</p> -
<blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="hurricane" data-cid="588728" data-time="1466062483">
<div>
<p>Even though I try not to swear in my posts </p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>The fuck? That is some pretty bullshit there - go to town my man. Its the fucking <em>internet</em>!</p>
<p> </p>
<p>;)</p> -
<blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="ACT Crusader" data-cid="588673" data-time="1466050933"><p>Without overgeneralising this, my experience dealing with NZ young men with Samoan heritage is that they generally do. If there is a fa'amatai or chief around they are very respectful. If there is a grandparent around they listen.<br><br>
It was interesting reading when Tana was captain and the players with Samoan heritage would go out of their way for him.</p></blockquote>
Totally off topic but this is in part one reason why I think T will quietly work his way up through the coaching ranks to be AB coach one day. -
<p>@NTA - the reason for the reticence to swear is that I am a Christian bloke - but will occassionally swear if the moment demands it. Or if I think it will be humorous.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>So I have a very tentative point I want to make and would like to request up front no flames please. If it sounds like I am smoking something then please just let me know and I will drop my point. I respect the opinion of the TSF posters so I want some feedback on the following.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I have been following Australian rugby all my life. Most of the time we have better forwards than them and hence we win the game. In a lot of those years the Aussie backline has been world class; players like Nick Farr Jones, Campese, Horan, Folau, Beale, Giteau, AAC are all immensely talented.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I feel that Australian rugby victories are very much built on winning the battle up front and gaining the hard yards and then spinning it wide for the backs to do their work.</p>
<p>Now pretty much all sides subscribe to that philosophy. And definitely the All Blacks do. But should Australia?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Should the Australian team learn and practice in game tactics for when they meet a stronger pack like the ABs or the mighty England pack. Because it seems like they often meet these circumstances and don't have a plan B. Plan A is "let's win this up front boys and establish a platform" and then when that doesn't work there is no adjustment.</p>
<p>Is there any merit to Australia developing tactics for when they are being dominated up front and somehow bringing their backs more into the game as a counter measure and just clearing the base quickly to the backs?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Any responses valued.</p>