Quade Cooper a must if Wallabies are to embrace a play to win culture BY:ALAN JONES From:The Australian June 25, 2013 12:00AM
THE disillusion with the past performances of the Wallabies is most probably best borne out by the reaction to last Saturday night's defeat at Suncorp Stadium.
Sections of the media and the public called it a "super" rugby game - a comment which derives almost entirely from the fact that the game was close, when many feared for something much worse.
Such an assumption of a potential hiding at the hands of the Lions ignores the fact that throughout the generations Australia has enjoyed unlimited rugby talent. So it is today.
Such is the talent at our disposal that we don't have far to go to not only bridge the gap but take charge of any encounter with any side, including the British and Irish Lions. But this depends entirely on two things - the people who are charged with the assignment on the paddock and the playing culture which determines how they go about the task. It is impossible to translate from a team which seems to hope that it won't lose by much, to a team that knows it can win, without the inclusion of Quade Cooper at five-eighth.
Cooper is a player who's always looking for an opportunity to break the line rather than conforming with a planned structure that says let's establish five phases or six phases and then have a go at breaking the line. Cooper seems to me a player who thinks if we can score on the first use of the ball let's do it, rather than bother with going from phase one to phase two, picking and driving and slowing down the attack. Let's face it - forwards on the ground are rarely worth a lot to the team. Forwards have the mistaken view coached into them that their job is to win ball. A forward's real job is to get the opposition forwards out of the back line, so emptying the opposition defence that we can launch a one-on-one attack, and Australia has taught the world how to do that successfully.
When Cooper plays for Queensland it seems that he's prepared to take risks, as did Will Genia the other night. And you've got to do that if you want to win Test matches. Israel Folau, having scored two magnificent tries in a spectacular but unsurprising debut, barely saw the ball in the second half. I have no doubt Cooper would have been quietly calling the shots, having spotted the weakness out wide, to feed Folau - in layman's language, get the ball to him no matter what. Potentially one of the most lethal players on the field was effectively starved of the football, having already shown what he can do with it.
If you watch Cooper play for Queensland he seems to have a twin strategy about kicking - if you're going to kick it, kick it as far as you can into their territory, accelerate the chase in a straight line and make the opposition as uncomfortable as possible. No one at any level likes running the ball off their own line - that's when mistakes are made and that's when you can crank up the attack.
There is no point in having the Beales or Folaus of the world on the paddock if we don't feed them with quick and quality ball. Of course it's been repeated ad nauseam that there's a problem with Cooper's defence, though I note, and I'm not a disciple of statistics, Wayne Smith in this newspaper yesterday arguing that Quade Cooper's defensive record, in a percentage sense, however that is calculated, is better than that of Kurtley Beale. I say who cares. I once had a player in my side by the name of Mark Ella who has just been voted among four of the greatest Wallabies since World War II along with David Campese, Ken Catchpole and Col Windon. The players and I used to joke about Mark's defence, though, like Cooper, he was a willing and able defender.
I used to argue that I had plenty of people on the paddock who could defend. There were few people in the world who could attack like Ella and Campese.
Three players have been added to this Wallabies squad for the second Test. Quade Cooper is not one of them.
There's a simple rule in picking your team - you pick the best, you pick to win and you pick also, in the modern era, to make the turnstiles turn. The public want to see more of the Quade Coopers of the world, not less. The limited explanations for his omission don't pass intelligent scrutiny.
Broadcaster Alan Jones is a former Wallabies coach.
