Timana Gives Us A Taste Of Some French Cooking
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday June 24, 2008
THE French generally have a "vive la difference" attitude to playing and thinking about rugby.
Hopefully, they will bring this quality to their Test against Australia at the ANZ Stadium on Saturday night. Rather like the offering of an erratic chef, you never really know what you are going to get from a French side, aside from the knowledge that what Les Bleus deliver on the rugby field is rarely bland. With a French-Vietnamese inside-centre Francois Trinh-Duc, who plays the position rather like a winger, the likelihood is that the boring, no-cream approach of French sides under the sterile coaching of Bernard Laporte will be now written off as a sad chapter in the history of French rugby.The elan France generally bring to the rugby game is timely. ARU boss John O'Neill has warned that one of the football codes may not survive. This is a serious warning. Sydney has seen sculling, boxing and tennis wax and then wane as sports that once dominated the headlines. Rugby must not believe it is immune from this sort of history. In 1907, the Wallabies attracted 48,677 spectators to a Test at the SCG against the All Blacks. This crowd remained a record until 1980, when 48,898 fans saw the Wallabies play the All Blacks, again at the SCG. But a couple of years after the 1907 record crowd, rugby was struggling for survival.Now, 100 years on, that struggle has not yet been resolved. What rugby has in favour now in the survival stakes is the international appeal of the game. Until the 1980s, the international appeal was essentially driven by NZ, as the statistics on the largest Test crowds suggests. And to a certain extent, this NZ connection still applies, with the Wallabies playing four Tests against the All Blacks this year, including a huge revenue-raiser in Hong Kong.Since the first Rugby World Cup in 1987, rugby has exploded as a world game. This has created new opponents for the Wallabies and new tournaments, such as the Pacific Nations Cup, for Australian teams to play in and spectators to enjoy. Last weekend, for instance, 19 internationals were played in Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Africa, New Zealand and Australia. On a social level, too, the game has expanded. In Dublin last week, the Sydney Convicts won the Bingham World Cup, an international tournament for gay rugby sides.On Sunday, there was the final round of the inaugural IRB Junior World Cup. The tournament, which will be an annual fixture, was a resounding success. NZ, with mobile props weighing 130 kilograms, won the tournament, conceding one try and playing beautiful rugby. The disappointment was the fifth-placed Australian side, which had seven players with Super 14 experience. The Australian backs had no fluency in their play. But most worrying was the poor scrum work. It was as if the Junior Australians were replicating the worst elements of the play of the Wallabies over the past few years, particularly at scrum time.With this in mind, I watched the Australia A v Tonga match at North Sydney Oval on Sunday, paying particular attention to the scrums. The news is good. The front row of Sekope Kepu (who learnt his rugby in NZ), Sean Hardman and Ben Alexander (who was picked by Alan Jones earlier in the year as great prospect) mastered a strong Tongan pack. It was the most convincing scrumming I've seen by an Australian side for a long time.And we saw a sensational display of all the rugby skills, running, passing, offloading, quick foot-work - the list could go on - from Timana Tahu, the former rugby league star. As Tahu made break after break, a vision of a future excitement-machine Wallabies back line of Luke Burgess, Matt Giteau, Tahu, Stirling Mortlock, Lote Tuqiri, Peter Hynes and Cameron Shepherd came to mind. This is a back line for victory, not just survival. spiro@theroar.com.au
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald