The three-horse race to win a place in Eddie Jones’s first squad is hotting up ahead of Australia’s Rugby World Cup campaignRugby is a tough game played by hard athletes but it’s true powerbase isn’t muscle. Rather it is twinkling toes and magic hands that puts points on the scoreboard and gets bums on seats. It’s why the heart of every great team is a playmaker – someone who makes things happen, a creative genius who can execute basic skills brilliantly and also conjure the extraordinary.A cut-out ball that hits a player on the fly, the popped pass to a raging bull on a crazy angle, a flick or feint, a dummy or double-pump. Hands, eyes, imagination in a harmony...
Rugby Australia has bought a supremely marketable, freakishly talented player who will also be a powerful bargaining chipJoseph Suaalii will not begin playing for the Wallabies until 2025 but make no mistake: he started working for Rugby Australia the moment news broke of his signing.Suaalii will become the standard bearer for rugby’s new golden age, Australia’s poster boy for the 2027 Rugby World Cup, for leading the women’s game to professionalism and for restoring growth at the grassroots across the nation. Continue reading...
In a World Cup year, the coaches of Australia’s five provinces are as much on notice as the playersThe first wave of final auditions for the Wallabies 2023 World Cup squad is about to begin, as Super Rugby Pacific kicks off on Friday with the ACT Brumbies v NSW Waratahs. With Australia seventh in the world rugby rankings, there’s plenty to do and not much time to do it - there is little more than six months until the first pool game in France on 8 September.Already, new Wallabies coach Eddie Jones has likened the task to “a smash-and-grab job”. Luckily, Rugby Australia has hired the wiliest thief in the game: a man with an 82% win-rate at four World...
The coaching trio have no time to experiment as the race towards this year’s Rugby World Cup enters its final stagesIt used to be said that preparing for the 2023 Rugby World Cup was a gradual process. People liked to paint it as a painstaking four-year project, with an emphasis on steady incremental gains. Then everyone panicked. England, Wales and Australia have new head coaches with blank (ish) sheets of paper and there is an Old Testament feel to what happened just weeks ago.Because, suddenly, the marathon is a flat-out mass sprint. The three unions in question are banking on the ability of, respectively, Steve Borthwick, Warren Gatland and Eddie Jones to accelerate their teams from 0-60 mph quicker than...
Australia claimed two scalps and climbed the world rankings but most important of all it was a win for Generation NextThe Wallabies fell short in lots of ways on their spring tour. They tasted defeat in three Tests and were lucky not to lose a fourth. They finished the international season with only five victories and nine losses and never won back-to-back. The injury toll was horrendous: 40 Wallabies battered or broken. And they are still no closer to locking in a 9-10 playmaking dynamic to spark their erratic attack.And yet, this year they defeated England, South Africa, Argentina, Scotland and Wales and went within a whisker of vanquishing France, Ireland and New Zealand, the top three sides in the...