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[2017 Rugby Championship] Round 2: New Zealand v Australia (26/08/2017)

carter was eventually a backup/fill-in player, Ross was a starting lock. Honestly I dont remember carter very well I was a kid at the time!
carter was a pet of johnHarts. how carter was preferred over the great joshKronfeld i dont know. but despite josh being the hardest worker on the field, him and mehrtens were blamed the losses and subsequently dropped.
hart soon saw the error of his ways and reinstated both
 
Cheers Steveo - Always interesting to get the view of a South African who's living here.

Being up in Brisbane you'd have now become accustomed to how NRL mad they are and how the entire state goes nuts for State of Origin for months every year - a series that sucks even more oxygen out of other sports air time in NSW and Qld. But at least in Sydney and Brisbane Rugby has some profile - you head to Melbourne or Adelaide and it might as well not exist. It was getting better in Perth, but that's all gone now.
Absolutely. I've spent a few days in both Melbourne and Adelaide for work and it might as well not even exist. I read a newspaper in Melbourne and in the 8 sport pages and AFL took up 7.5 pages. National rugby had a single small column. In Adelaide it's basically a foreign sport code.

Thing is Adelaide has two AFL teams, with the recent Crows vs Swans match having a capacity crowd of 51000. And that was a regular league game! And QLD sustains 3 professional Rugby League teams easily.

I know I'm preaching to the choir but the ARU is possibly the worst professional sporting body in Australia. They're hopeless and every level, especially grassroots where the other codes do well.
 
Ross played 8 tests only won 4 ? 50% success rate?

I think it would be really hard to find another all black with such a low winning %age as Issac Ross.

Colin Farrell - 2 tests, 1 win, 1 loss - 50%

Honestly I dont remember Carter very well I was a kid at the time!

I can sum up in two words why Carter was sellected for the All Blacks......... John Hart

But don't sweat it Larksea. if you can't rememebr him... you haven't missed a thing.
 
https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/rugby...ate-matchwinner-leaves-aussie-pundits-stunned


i imagine this wouldve been alot of aussies.
in fact when beale scored i thought the wallabies were overly jovial, patting each other on the back when the game wasnt over.... mind you, so did ABs with about 3 minutes left on the clock.

Beale was so sure he'd scored the match winner that he kicked the ball into the stands after dotting it down

I doubt he'd be doing that again. It would have been marked down as a win against any other team, just not NZ
 
Well some punter in NZ had $100,000 on the ABs at $1.04.

That is insane, why would you risk $100k in a 2 horse race, (even if one horse was lame!), to win $4k?

Logic says that if you had a spare $100k to blow, the only team to back was the Wobblies, sounds like that punter had never studied probability! Asymmetric odds like that are rare.
 
I just watched it a third time and I have no idea how they kept up that pace because I was getting breathless just watching it.
Unbelievable game.
Yes plenty of errors from a variety of players and some shoddy tackles from a variety ofg players, but trying to continue attacking expansively at pace, just astounding.
IF... if Aussie can produce this kind of performance against the Bokke it's game on.
 
im not sure how he made it into the team. he offers nothing but has been an incumbent for over a year now.
Agreed, he's not good enough to be there. Just seems that they're so invested in him at this point that they can't bring themselves to get rid of him.
 
Dont forget poor old me! I had $50 at 15-1 on the Wobblies, I spent about $749 of my winnings and then the bloody AB's came rolling over the top of us!
gutted! hard luck galumay. i feel for u
but theres a reason u got such high odds
havent u ever heard the adage , "never bet against black" ?
 
just watched it a third time and I have no idea how they kept up that pace because I was getting breathless just watching it.
Unbelievable game.
Good point. Aus showed a lot of fitness to keep up till she very end
 
carter was a pet of johnHarts. how carter was preferred over the great joshKronfeld i dont know. but despite josh being the hardest worker on the field, him and mehrtens were blamed the losses and subsequently dropped.
hart soon saw the error of his ways and reinstated both

You might want to go back to the 1995 RWC final and watch Francois Pienaar pushing Josh Kronfeld around like a little schoolboy in short trousers.
Kronnie was bossed all day long by his master and it was ugly viewing from an AB perspective.
The big Japie hard bugger smashed Kronnie all about the place.

Mark Carter was quicker than Kronfeld, that much is for sure.
What did we ever win with Kronfeld?
Zero.
What did we win with Mehrtens?
Zero.
Good players but not great in my book.
They won us nothing and how long did they play?
Too long.
I remember being very grateful when Kronfeld was no longer selected. He wasn't very clever, prone to coughing up penalties.
Mehrts was a great kicker but not my cup of tea at any other role he was to play for the AB's.
Don't get me started on Justin Marshall.
If you want to pick on an Auckland player not worthy of making the AB's you could do a lot worse than Mark Carter, try Bernie McCahill. Now there was an ordinary player.
 
Donald only got ~23 caps.

How many times did he warm the bench without getting on the park?

... he was much better than he ever got credit for

Not at AB level.
He was consistently excellent for Waikato but he never brought that quality to the AB's.
He struggled to cope with the pace of the game, his game management was average and his running game was limited. It was primarily his consistent place kicking that kept him in the picture and to be fair his defence was above average.
He got loads of chances and ok he was up against DC for a starting spot, but you still have to make a fist of it when you get a chance and the drop in quality was eye opening to NZ er's outside of the Waikato.
When he was dropped it was a shame because they persisted with him for so long it became a costly experiment.

...and he had the hardest job in the world being compared to the best 10 the game has ever seen.

Norm Hewitt faced a much longer and less fruitful task being understudy to Fitzy. He did it for years and when he got his chances, on those rare occasions, he didn't look or feel like he was out of his depth.

He had some excellent performances in 2008 where he came off bench a few times when the AB's were down to produce some critical plays to win games.

Even a broken clock is correct twice a day. One swallow doesn't make a summer.

I just dont think Donald gets a fair deal.

I think everybody respects him as a champion for Waikato. He earned his AB call up on form for Waikato.
He just didn't cut it at the top level for the AB's, which was a shame because he was a likeable fella off the park, we all wanted him to succeed, he just wasn't good enough.
However, everybody will cherish the great rugby story of his comeback from fishing on the river, to putting on his boots for the RWC final and kicking what proved to be the winning points.
 
The scene was set for a great story because he was no.4 in the pecking order.
No.4 doesn't exist.
You generally have an incumbent, and a challenger, then a potential hovering in the background waiting fo a chance to develop.
N0.4 is largely non existent.
He wasn't in the squad so he didn't play in any of the lead up games...
Thats why he was fishing. ;-)
He thought there was no chance he would be selected.
Wasn't in the frame at all and then Boom !

Comes back to my point about how experience always helps in the end.
I'm not complaining, he got the job done when all the leading choices were crocked on the field of battle.
I like him as a player, he just wasn't regular AB starter material.
History has been kind to him.
When you look at a player like Fekitoa, well okay it's possible he could have a role in one of the next two RWC's, it's far more likely he will drift away and never attain the chance for rugby immortality through a great story created by a rare sequence of events.
But if it does, his experience with 20 odd caps will stand him in good stead.
 
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You might want to go back to the 1995 RWC final and watch Francois Pienaar pushing Josh Kronfeld around like a little schoolboy in short trousers.
Kronnie was bossed all day long by his master and it was ugly viewing from an AB perspective.
The big Japie hard bugger smashed Kronnie all about the place.

The Jones Boy - i dont think its possible for me to disagree with you any more than i do in relation to you post.
piernaar didnt own kronfeld. no one ever owned kronfeld. also keep in mind that kronfeld was still a rookie in that game as well suffering from food poisoning. piernaar was a great at the peak of his career .


Mark Carter was quicker than Kronfeld, that much is for sure.
i'm not even sure carter was faster tbh. he was lighter which is about the ony thing that can be said about him.


What did we ever win with Kronfeld?
Zero.
What did we win with Mehrtens?
Zero.
What did we win with cullen, or bunce, or randel or goldie or hayman or umaga or carlos. so every allBlack involved that didnt win a worldCup won zero?
what about the super ***les and bledisloes that kronfeld and merhtens won? do they count as anything?


Good players but not great in my book.
i'll agree to disagree with you here.
if merhtens and kronfeld cant be called great then no allBlack has ever been great.
mertens was a rugby genius and kronfeld was an unrelenting ball seeking cruise missle.
 

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