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Yee-haw! Barnes finally arrives
Wayne Smith | September 10, 2007
BERRICK BARNES had a serious case of the yee-haws happening yesterday.
It all started when, on the bus on the way to his Test debut for the Wallabies, he chose - as any 21-year-old Queenslander would - John Williamson's Rainin' on the Rock and True Blue as the psych-up music to pump through his headphones.(The bush finds a new hero
)
Mostly he confined himself to some toe-tappin' but, sometimes you gotta let it all out and he fears a couple of yee-haws may have escaped his lips, violating the sacred silence that traditionally settles on the Wallabies on their way to battle.
But he knows for a fact that he yee-hawed out loud as the two teams lined up side by side behind their national flags and walked into Lyon's Stade Gerland to the thunderous roars of 43 Frenchmen and 40,000 Australian tourists. He knows, because a couple of his team-mates let him know.
Then the match began and he took his place on the bench, not quite as nervous as he had been when he made his NRL debut for the Broncos as an 18-year-old but still edgy. Fortunately, the spectators were getting into it as well and when they started up the Mexican wave, he could have sworn he had died and gone to the Boxing Day Test at the MCG.
Right on schedule, well actually about seven minutes ahead of schedule, at the 53-minute mark, there may have been another yee-haw when team manager Phil Thomson gave him the tap on the shoulder. The big moment had arrived. He was on.
The Japanese, bless their Cherry Blossom-pickin' hearts, obliged by aiming their kick-off - they had had quite a few of them to practice by this stage - straight at him. Before he had even had a moment to get his bearings, he made the catch and then boomed a huge spiral punt into touch 50m downfield. That felt good!
Whoops, that felt bad! Still thinking about the kick, he hasn't got his mind back on the job when the Guv fires out his first pass to him in a Test match and he forgets to run on to it. Let's just hit the pause button here and go through this slowly.
"George Gregan, he of the world record 135 Tests, is passing the ball to little ol' me, for the first time on my Test debut. And I forget to catch it. Next thing I know, the Guv is giving me the glare. You know the look I'm talking about. The Guv glare," Barnes said.
The ball sails straight past but fortunately Matt Giteau picks it up on the bounce, does a bit of a shimmy and then picks up Gregan steaming through, his regal displeasure at the non-acceptance of one of his passes adding oomph to those powerful little pistons of his.
Barnes reckons he's deep in dung by now and better redeem himself quickly, so he hightails it after the Guv who clearly wants him to position himself on his left shoulder. But there's more room out to the right so he ducks in behind Gregan and plants the accelerator and the Guv does the rest, drawing the final defender before somewhat disdainfully sending him the pass that puts him over for his first Test try. On only his second touch of the ball.
What, with all the slaps and the hugs, he doesn't even notice that Gregan has turned on his heel and is strolling back to halfway, a silly little self-satisfied grin on his face. By this stage Barnes is walking on air, which may explain why the Japanese defenders, whose tackles seem to be of the grass-scything type, miss him again when he goes in for try number two a few minutes later. And he almost got a third right at the death when ankle-tapped with the line open.
Still, good job of work. And it gets one to thinking that maybe the Wallabies have finally unearthed a successor to Steve Larkham.
Yee-haw!
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