F
Fushitsusha
Guest
You can't really disagree with this article... all the Australian teams have been displaying poor basic skill levels all season and Robbie Deans must surely be ******...
Australian Super 14 teams are suffering horrendous, continual skill errors
By Wayne Smith
April 06, 2009
Rugby is a violent, inexact sport, which is of course at the heart of its appeal, but surely there should be a limit to how much imprecision Australian teams are allowed to inflict on their long-suffering supporters.
Perhaps while the game is putting itself through the whole ludicrous process of undoing many of the law variations it introduced so that half of the rugby world could ignore them, it might consider experimenting with baseball's mercy rule.
Not to be too prescriptive but once a team has had, oh, I dunno, two dozen goof-ups, the referee should be authorised to blow full-time, award the game to the other side and put everyone out of their misery.
True, the Reds' past two matches would have been abandoned before half-time but, hey, it's not called a "mercy rule" for nothing.
Or maybe, rather than rewarding losers with a bonus point - once upon a time beaten teams kept striving because of pride and character, not because of artificial incentives - sides that fail to use up their quota of goof-ups should be rewarded instead.
Maybe then the skill level in the professional game might approach the standard displayed by the 1977-78 Australian Schoolboys in the ABC's fine Rugby in the Seventies series replayed on Saturday.
OK, I confess to doing some channel-surfing when I should have been watching the Chiefs-Lions match. But as exciting a player as he is, there are only so many times you can watch Sione Lauaki drop the ball cold before your channel-surfing trigger finger gets unbearably itchy.
Anyway, there on the ABC in all their fresh-faced, slim-waisted glory were the Ella brothers, Michael O'Connor, Tony Melrose and all the other famous names from that Schoolboys side catching, passing, putting players through gaps and running into holes with nary a stumble, fumble or falcon.
Passes were thrown sympathetically in front of the receiver not behind them. (Sam Norton-Knight please note.) Nor were they thrown forward. (Lote Tuqiri, come on down.) Nor were they dropped. (Take your pick - Blair Connor, Rod Davies, Damien Fitzpatrick, Lachlan Turner, Alfi Mafi etc, etc.)
There were explosions of brilliance not of brains. If the Australian Schoolboys of 30 years ago played dirty, they must have done it sneakily in the peasoup fog that blanketed London the day they beat England Schools, where no one could see them.
Not like Reds' replacement Scott Higginbotham, who fell hook, line and sinker for Josh Valentine's ****ling jersey-tugging and in full view of everyone let fly with a ridiculous haymaker just when Queensland was set to score a try that might have put them back in the match.
Come to think of it, there weren't any of Valentine's aggravating antics to be seen either and as pleased as he looked with himself after Higginbotham was yellow-carded, hopefully one day it will dawn on the Force halfback that he has done nothing to distinguish himself.
If there was one word that summed up the admittedly carefully-edited Schoolboys footage, it was "finesse". Some of the catching and handling skills they displayed were utterly sublime and while they weren't subjected to the same constraints of time and space that today's aggressive Super 14 defences now impose, these were, remember, schoolboys.
Frankly, the skill level displayed by most of the Australian teams on the weekend, but the Reds and Waratahs most especially, didn't come close. They were appallingly unprofessional.
The Waratahs should have put the Stormers away by 30 points. Instead, right to the death, they were butchering tries and keeping their very limited opponents in the contest.
The fact that the Tahs' final goof-up involved two bumbling front-rowers, Sekope Kepu and Fitzpatrick, might have looked comical but would it still have seemed so amusing afterwards had the South Africans made it all the way to the tryline with their last-gasp attack, as they almost did?
Certainly there is plenty for NSW backs guru Scott Wisemantle, the former Wallabies skills coach, to work on in the coming weeks. But at least the Tahs did enough things right to earn their sixth win and consolidate their place in the top four.
The Reds, by contrast, were digging in at the other end of the Super 14 table, the end they have made their own for five years in inglorious succession. With still six rounds remaining, their season is as good as over, not because they couldn't create opportunities but because they didn't have the composure, the ability to execute under pressure, to finish them off.
Coach Phil Mooney believes the problem is that his players have started to believe everything written about them. So perhaps they'll believe this - looking flashy isn't good enough; there are no points for almost scoring tries and rugby consists of two parts, defence as well as attack.
The Brumbies and Force have pretty much sidestepped this diatribe, not because they played perfect games on the weekend - far from it - but because they chose to seize their chances rather than to squander them.
That might seem a curious way of phrasing it but ultimately that's what it comes down to - a matter of choice.
Players either choose to make the effort to practise their skills so that they can perform them without thinking under pressure or they choose not to.
There is no excuse for so-called professional footballers continually making schoolboy errors. Particularly since the Schoolboys didn't even make them.
Mercy, please.
Australian Super 14 teams are suffering horrendous, continual skill errors
By Wayne Smith
April 06, 2009
Rugby is a violent, inexact sport, which is of course at the heart of its appeal, but surely there should be a limit to how much imprecision Australian teams are allowed to inflict on their long-suffering supporters.
Perhaps while the game is putting itself through the whole ludicrous process of undoing many of the law variations it introduced so that half of the rugby world could ignore them, it might consider experimenting with baseball's mercy rule.
Not to be too prescriptive but once a team has had, oh, I dunno, two dozen goof-ups, the referee should be authorised to blow full-time, award the game to the other side and put everyone out of their misery.
True, the Reds' past two matches would have been abandoned before half-time but, hey, it's not called a "mercy rule" for nothing.
Or maybe, rather than rewarding losers with a bonus point - once upon a time beaten teams kept striving because of pride and character, not because of artificial incentives - sides that fail to use up their quota of goof-ups should be rewarded instead.
Maybe then the skill level in the professional game might approach the standard displayed by the 1977-78 Australian Schoolboys in the ABC's fine Rugby in the Seventies series replayed on Saturday.
OK, I confess to doing some channel-surfing when I should have been watching the Chiefs-Lions match. But as exciting a player as he is, there are only so many times you can watch Sione Lauaki drop the ball cold before your channel-surfing trigger finger gets unbearably itchy.
Anyway, there on the ABC in all their fresh-faced, slim-waisted glory were the Ella brothers, Michael O'Connor, Tony Melrose and all the other famous names from that Schoolboys side catching, passing, putting players through gaps and running into holes with nary a stumble, fumble or falcon.
Passes were thrown sympathetically in front of the receiver not behind them. (Sam Norton-Knight please note.) Nor were they thrown forward. (Lote Tuqiri, come on down.) Nor were they dropped. (Take your pick - Blair Connor, Rod Davies, Damien Fitzpatrick, Lachlan Turner, Alfi Mafi etc, etc.)
There were explosions of brilliance not of brains. If the Australian Schoolboys of 30 years ago played dirty, they must have done it sneakily in the peasoup fog that blanketed London the day they beat England Schools, where no one could see them.
Not like Reds' replacement Scott Higginbotham, who fell hook, line and sinker for Josh Valentine's ****ling jersey-tugging and in full view of everyone let fly with a ridiculous haymaker just when Queensland was set to score a try that might have put them back in the match.
Come to think of it, there weren't any of Valentine's aggravating antics to be seen either and as pleased as he looked with himself after Higginbotham was yellow-carded, hopefully one day it will dawn on the Force halfback that he has done nothing to distinguish himself.
If there was one word that summed up the admittedly carefully-edited Schoolboys footage, it was "finesse". Some of the catching and handling skills they displayed were utterly sublime and while they weren't subjected to the same constraints of time and space that today's aggressive Super 14 defences now impose, these were, remember, schoolboys.
Frankly, the skill level displayed by most of the Australian teams on the weekend, but the Reds and Waratahs most especially, didn't come close. They were appallingly unprofessional.
The Waratahs should have put the Stormers away by 30 points. Instead, right to the death, they were butchering tries and keeping their very limited opponents in the contest.
The fact that the Tahs' final goof-up involved two bumbling front-rowers, Sekope Kepu and Fitzpatrick, might have looked comical but would it still have seemed so amusing afterwards had the South Africans made it all the way to the tryline with their last-gasp attack, as they almost did?
Certainly there is plenty for NSW backs guru Scott Wisemantle, the former Wallabies skills coach, to work on in the coming weeks. But at least the Tahs did enough things right to earn their sixth win and consolidate their place in the top four.
The Reds, by contrast, were digging in at the other end of the Super 14 table, the end they have made their own for five years in inglorious succession. With still six rounds remaining, their season is as good as over, not because they couldn't create opportunities but because they didn't have the composure, the ability to execute under pressure, to finish them off.
Coach Phil Mooney believes the problem is that his players have started to believe everything written about them. So perhaps they'll believe this - looking flashy isn't good enough; there are no points for almost scoring tries and rugby consists of two parts, defence as well as attack.
The Brumbies and Force have pretty much sidestepped this diatribe, not because they played perfect games on the weekend - far from it - but because they chose to seize their chances rather than to squander them.
That might seem a curious way of phrasing it but ultimately that's what it comes down to - a matter of choice.
Players either choose to make the effort to practise their skills so that they can perform them without thinking under pressure or they choose not to.
There is no excuse for so-called professional footballers continually making schoolboy errors. Particularly since the Schoolboys didn't even make them.
Mercy, please.
