Shots fired, this week, from a couple of canny old Australian coaches. First Bob Dwyer, who singled out Joe Marler. “The English work on having a reputation for legal scrummaging while doing the opposite,” Dwyer said in the Daily Telegraph. “You only have to look back to a couple of years ago and England were loth to start with Marler because even though he was good around the park, his scrummaging was not up to standard.” The reason Marler is there now, Dwyer reckons, is because he’s been taught to drive in illegally, at an angle, something he advises the referees to look out for.
Following up, Eddie Jones. He picked Chris Robshaw. “An outstanding club player but at international level he just doesn’t have that point of difference,” Jones wrote in the Daily Mail. “He carries OK, he tackles OK, but he’s not outstandingly good in any area. I think that is his limiting factor. He’s a good workmanlike player, but he does not have the specialist skills as an openside.” Jones, like Dwyer, never misses an opportunity to take a kick at England while they are down.
As for the current incumbent, Michael Cheika, he is keeping his own counsel. Cheika seems to think that careless talk costs, and so he and his players have been on their best behaviour all week, despite the best efforts of both the British and Australian press to stir things up before Saturday’s match. “Do I have to answer for him as well?” Cheika said, with a sigh and then a smile, when asked about Dwyer’s remarks. “Mate, the only scrummaging technique we are interested in is our own.”
All week Cheika has insisted that his team are just going about their own business, and resisted invitations to comment on England’s form. It is not just a media strategy, but a message he has tried to drill into his team. As Cheika put it: “Talking about the opponent or some flaw in the opponent, from our point of view, is disrespectful and leads to an excuse environment. For us trying to pick a fault in anything in the opposition, whether it is the scrum, or this or that, to complain or talk about it, is a weakness on our part.”
Expanding on that, Cheika explained exactly why he did not much care who was playing, so long as Australia won. “External motivations like that last for two minutes on the field. When you go through 80 minutes of warfare – or our version of it – you need bigger motivations than that. That motivation can go away in a heartbeat as soon as one thing goes wrong. Motivations have to be from deep inside. Having a real strong ‘why’ as to why we want to be the best we can. Those other things are relatively peripheral. They are quite superficial because they dissipate very quickly when there’s 82,000 English people screaming at you in the stadium.”
Cheika is impressive. Clear about what he thinks, and what he wants. He has picked the same team to play England as he did for Australia’s first match, against Fiji. In between he put out his second XV against Uruguay. “We set out with an original plan we wanted to run with and I feel that has happened,” he said. “There were a fair few tough selection decisions across the board about what would be the best mix to start the match but we felt the team who played in the first game did a good job and also understood the improvements that needed to be made in the lead-up to this game. So we decided to stick with it.”
No shilly-shallying over selection here, although Cheika did delay naming his replacements until after the afternoon’s training session. He was reckoned to be in two minds about whether to stack the forward pack, considering picking six forwards and only two backs on the bench, as opposed to the more traditional split of five and three.
Jones and Dwyer chose their targets well. They touched on two key areas. Dwyer seeking to undermine England’s customary advantage at the scrum, Jones to play up Australia’s edge at the breakdown. Cheika has looked to address the first by bringing in Mario Ledesma as a specialist coach, and accentuate the second by picking Michael Hooper at No7, and another specialist openside, David Pocock, at No8. It is a combination that worked brilliantly well when Cheika first tried it in Australia’s win over New Zealand in August.
“I’d probably be a bit more traditionalist in the way I set up the back row with a different type of blindside flanker,” Cheika said. “But the two lads have played too well so far for me not to select them together. “I think just because I might have certain ideas, I should be open to change on that front.”
