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Wayne Smith | June 16, 2009
Article from: The Australian
IT was once the most hurtful barb that could ever be hurled against a Wallabies side, that it had played conservatively. Now, Australian captain Stirling Mortlock embraces the description.
The Wallabies might have outscored Italy five tries to one at Canberra Stadium on Saturday night, with teenage run-on debutant James O'Connor tizzing-up the occasion with a personal hat-trick, but it was very much a triumph of no-nonsense field-position rugby.
Far from being offended by the suggestion his side had played a controlled, conservative game, with Matt Giteau and Berrick Barnes angling pinpoint kicks into the corners to pin the Italians down, Mortlock yesterday spoke enthusiastically about the tactics and suggested they were designed to fry far bigger fish than the Azzurri.
"That was the pleasing aspect from our perspective, that we played a consistent kicking game and were effective at mounting pressure on them through our kicking game," said Mortlock.
"Down the track, it's very important. The two matches we've played this year (against the Barbarians and Italy) our kicking game has been very good. Hopefully we can make a bit of progress on our ability to mount pressure on the opposition with ball in hand as well."
If that happens at Etihad Stadium on Saturday night in the rematch with Italy, well and good, but clearly coach Robbie Deans is using these early-season internationals to embed tactics needed sooner than expected against the giant-killing French and then next month in the Tri Nations.
Significantly, the All Blacks played most of the rugby in the Dunedin Test on Saturday and lost, squeezed by the pressure France exerted at the breakdown and by their ferocious, unrelenting outside-in defence.
It was hardly a lesson Deans needed to learn but it will not have hurt the Wallabies to be reminded that some old, harsh rugby realities are reasserting themselves now that the ELV sanctions no longer apply.
For all the high-fiving that greeted O'Connor's Boys Own heroics in Canberra, there was not a lot of frivolity about the Wallabies' play. Few 50-50 passes were thrown, tricky situations were cleaned up, not compounded, and Giteau and Barnes took a beady-eyed, dispassionate approach to running the game. If the Wallabies weren't going anywhere, ball was put expertly to boot. Somehow Barnes even managed to make an outlandishly tricky banana-kick to touch on the run appear routine.
Whatever else Deans may be as a coach, he is what Napoleon demanded all his generals be - lucky. The odds of him migrating from a team run by the best five-eighth in the world last year, Dan Carter, to one boasting the current holder of that title, Giteau, would have been ridiculously high all on their own. But it is truly amazing to think he could part company with Aaron Mauger in New Zealand and then, a year or so later, find another such heady "second five-eighth" in Australia in the person of Barnes.
Certainly Mortlock counts himself lucky to be playing alongside a player of Barnes's quiet but deadly efficiency. "It's a joy, basically," Mortlock said. "Berrick is an outstanding player and a great bloke. His core skills are fantastic kicking in games, his ball-playing ability as well, and defensively he's really solid."
It is unlikely Deans will tinker extensively with his side for the Second Test, although it would make sense for him to ease winger Peter Hynes back into the fray in place of Lachlan Turner, whose head still must be ringing after his sickening collision with Mauro Bergamasco's knee.
The Wallabies coach will surely look closely at his backrow after Italy succeeded in regularly slowing down Australia's ruck ball. While rugby stats are notoriously inaccurate pointers to workrates, it nonetheless is worrying that blindside flanker Dean Mumm was credited in one set of stats with no runs and only two tackles.
It wasn't surprising Mumm had some difficulty there after having spent most of the season in the Waratahs second-row but what the Wallabies need in the absence of Rocky Elsom is a blindside flanker making an Elsom-like impact around the field.
But second-row to back-row is a cinch switch compared with the one demanded of Ben Alexander, a specialist loosehead thrust in at tighthead for the final quarter in Canberra. Even against Italy's second-string front-row, Alexander struggled and while he is eagerly embracing the notion of becoming a prop who can play both sides, that's a process that normally takes months, if not years, certainly not weeks.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...015651,00.html