I completely agree with the previous posts. Its good to hear that people from other countries seem to have a good understanding of what has been happening. Deans has had a decent player pool to choose from but has chosen the wrong game plan, and its boring an 1 dimensional. One of his biggest problems is also his love of picking players out of position. O'Connor was never going to be the fiveighth we needed. He doesn't attack the line enough and his long passing/kicking isn't good enough. That being said, hes still a good player but should be in the back three, on the bench, or possibly 12.
What annoys me the most is that we were playing a good brand of rugby a few years ago (under deans) in the tri nations, not sure what year but it was the year beale slotted that penalty after the siren to win in SA. We may have lost a few games that year but i really enjoyed the rugby. I think there were a few scorelines of 40-30 or so. I can handle losing the bledisloe when we give it a real crack with running rugby but it doesnt sit well when we play one out rugby and still lose ugly. Not sure why deans decided to go this way, we've never had the tight forwards or big inside backs. Another thing is that recently we have conceded a lot of tries from aimless kicks, most of them come from positions where we could have run it from.
I can only hope mackenzie can make the step up...
And therein lay one of Deans' key problems; the lack of a decent front row. Winning rugby starts up front; it might be an old adage, but its as true today as it ever was. You might be able to win the occasional match with 20% possession and brilliant back play, but you aren't going to win consistently that way.
The front row of the Wallaby scrum has basically been owned on and off by just about all their major opposition for the last several years. It started with Al Baxter when he was cruelly exposed in only his third test by the England scrum in the RWC final in 2003, and again in 2005 at Twickenham when he was yellow carded for a deliberate collapse. Things have not gotten any better since as they selected a succession of front rowers that just could not cut the mustard. They were exposed by England in the quarter-final of the 2007 RWC and again by England in 2010, then by Ireland at the 2011 RWC. I haven't even mentioned how often they have run into scrum trouble in the Tri-Nations.
Many times they have been able to avoid trouble by avoiding scrummaging, firstly by not competing on the opposition's put-in, and relying on their superior backs to tackle the oppositions backs, and secondly by dropping the scrum on engage at their own put in, to take the steam out of the opponent's hit, then quickly feeding the reset scrum and getting the ball out as quickly as possible. Sooner or later, however, they would run into a referee (Rolland. Jutge, Poite) who would insist that they stay up on their feet and participate in a proper contest, and that is when they would be in trouble.
I'm not sure why Australia has had so much difficulty in developing front row forwards. It never used to be like that. Perhaps if they spent less money buying flash-harry ex-rugby league backs with million-dollar price-tags, like Tuiqiri, Sailor, Rogers, Folau etc, they might have more money to put into the development of front row forwards.