COMMENT: This young Wallabies team has been picked for now not the future

Thu, Sep 7, 2023, 11:36 PM
by Jim Tucker

Say what you like about the Wallabies’ first team for this exciting and wide-open Rugby World Cup in France but don’t say it is a team picked for 2027.

Too many people are saying just that. No one picks a team for the future because that future so often never arrives.

Coach Eddie Jones has picked a team for now. It may be so youthful and untried in places that certain players, just seven months ago, thought their best chance of seeing this World Cup was as spectators.

They are now the injection of fresh potential and energetic vigour to create a new Wallabies team. Fans are entering the unknown too.

What should they expect? That is the great unknown and certainly to Jones as well.

What you can say is he’s made strong, definitive calls. He’s going with Tate McDermott and Carter Gordon at halfback and flyhalf.

Michael Chieka so dithered around at the 2019 edition in Japan, we finished the tournament never knowing who were the No.1 halves with Will Genia, Nic White, Christian Lealiifano and Bernard Foley all shuffling in different combinations.

Another former coach, Robbie Deans, predicted at the 2011 tournament that James O’Connor, Quade Cooper and Kurtley Beale would be a golden thread through the next World Cup side.

Only Beale played a major role in 2015. O’Connor didn’t even win selection.

You don’t pick for the future, right? The players may definitely improve and be better four years from now but the least experienced major team at the 2023 tournament is prepped to have a red-hot crack right now.

They'll make mistakes but they'll also have windfall periods of great 20 or 40 minutes. Stitching together the good stuff for longer is the challenge as the Bledisloe Cup series showed.

You can think hosts France, the All Blacks, world No.1 Ireland or the dangerous South Africans are the favoured bunch. That may be the case but the Wallabies are a throwback to when Australians supported underdog teams in gold.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Just don’t give up trying to pronounce “Nawaqanitawase”. The NSW winger is going to score a bunch of tries, maybe starting with the opener against Georgia at Stade de France (Monday morning, AEST).

Walking the streets of Paris today, you can’t help but be drawn into the magnitude of this tournament or the love of rugby from the French.

There are two bars in Paris called No Scrum No Win. What a perfect clubhouse to watch games you are not attending.

Club NSNW may have the formula right too. The Georgians could field 15 props if they wanted. The Wallabies have two promising rookie props on the bench in Zane Nonggorr and Blake Schoupp, two names with big Scrabble potential for triple letter scores. We’ll know how well they scrum by Monday.

One thing Jones has done is add running to the pack with Taniela Tupou, Angus Bell, Rob Valetini, Fraser McReight all ball-runners. That doesn’t include a Will Skelton or Tom Hooper rumble.

Jones has put enormous faith in Ben Donaldson and Suliasi Vunivalu. Vunivalu repaid him with a strong Test against France recently. Now, it’s Donaldson’s turn.

Donaldson was shy or unfamiliar with coming into the backline for the NSW Waratahs early in Super Rugby when he looked a flyhalf playing out of position.

He will have trained consistently there. His boot and positional play has to be spot on. He adds goalkicking and flyhalf back-up for Carter Gordon which is not a bad thing.

This won’t a be a World Cup where the Wallabies look on song from 119.5 seconds into the tournament like at the 1999 World Cup.

That’s all it took for Tim Horan to score the first try against Romania in Belfast in the Wallabies’ opening game. He won a year's supply of Guinness for scoring a try in a shorter time than it takes to pour a pint of the black stuff. The cartwheeling streaker from Tasmania who spiced up the pre-match had only just got a warm coat on and Horan was over.

This will be a World Cup where you have to stay the journey to see if the Wallabies can keep improving through their pool games against Georgia, Fiji, Wales and Portugal.

A 4-0 winning streak of confidence might just be the tonic to pull these young, ambitious hopefuls together. How much better can they get is really the question for the bigger opponents coming their way.