Pretty impressed with the display, but the scrum is still inconsistent - even though they seemed to gain ascendency in the 2nd half - and our defence is still a little too leaky for my liking. Line breaks were pretty even and watching the game I always felt that if we'd been playing the Boks or 'The Darkness' we'd have let in almost as many tries as we scored.
Still, after this bloody awful year as a Wallabies fan I was pretty pleasantly surprised by how clinical the backs were and how effective our breakdown work was for this match. What's more, I also was impressed that the boys got on so well in spite of some pretty dubious calls here and there. Sending Hooper to the bin for not rolling away when he wasn't even impeding the play was just ridiculous... The red card too was pretty harsh I thought. I know he went past the horizontal, but he also corrected it somewhat too, and tried to balance him back down.
But anyway, I half expected us to lose to Ireland - what with a fair few key positions in that Lions series being Irish - so this match makes me hopeful that the boys may actually be on the up finally.
Like Conrad said above though, there a few things to ponder though: Next year Australia will likely have available missing talent to the tune of:
- Pocock
- Higginbotham
- Palu
- Speight
- Beale
That could give us a serious boost in both our set piece play and back-line penetration. Palu can be a bit of a passenger at times, but his frame gets him over the line most times, and Higginbotham was having the best year of his career till his injury, and will add both much needed grunt and ball playing skills to our second row.
In the backs we're doing pretty well, but you'd have to think Speight will force his way in. I can't fault Cummins and don't think anyone would want to remove our beloved honey-badger - the kid has so much enthusiasm and energy and more often than not converts any half chance he gets (sort of reminds me of Ben Tune), so I think we may see AAC dropped to the bench. The question then is what do you do with Beale if he gets back to his brilliant best for the Waratahs? Cooper is back to his best at 10 (and is actually tackling now too), and Folau is playing brilliantly at full back and is easily the best player under the high ball in the world right now (thanks Kevin Sheedy and GWS), so you wouldn't put Beale in for him and a Speight-Cummins wing combo would be about as lethal as they get, so you don't want to push Folau to the wing. I'd suggest putting him at 12 in a 2nd five-eight role, but having 2 dominant ball playing five-eights would confuse things I think.
Anyway, not a bad problem to have
. Kind of handy back up too if anyone gets injured - sort of like slotting Inglis in for Slater in the Kangaroos; you are going to scare opposition teams either way.
