Come on, Joe! Time to pay attention
JOE Schmidt, the recently-appointed coach of a Wallaby vintage who wear the same colours as Matthew Burke, David Campese, Tim Horan and John Eales but no longer play anything resembling the same sport, is widely celebrated for his attention to detail. So how’s this for a start?
“One of the challenges,” he said, casting his mind forward to the British and Irish Lions tour of Australia in the summer of next year, “is getting the right to earn support for those games because we’re going to be playing a team comprised of four nations that are all ranked well above us.”
Not quite, Joe. Not unless you’re talking about Ireland, England, Scotland and…er… Leinster. It did not take the investigative talents of Woodward (Bob, not Clive) and Bernstein (Carl, not Leonard) to uncover the fact that eighth-placed Wales are only a single place ahead of Australia in the current rankings. Above? Yes. Well above? Hardly.
The ability to misrepresent a table of sides listed in descending order was not, at a guess, the part of Schmidt’s CV that first attracted the Australian Rugby Union hierarchy to his candidacy. They were probably more taken by the deep foundations he put in place during his spell with Ireland, on which the current coach of the reigning Six Nations champions, Andy Farrell, has built the most formidable team in the country’s history.
It is also fair to suggest that if anyone can rescue the Wallabies from their current state of irrelevance and restore them to the front rank of the international game, where they patently belong, it’s the man from the Bay of Islands.
But mastery of the detail will be crucial. So come on, Joe: pay attention.