Center play is dead they say….

…..the Dud Allende fans. But yesterday we saw the Lions and Australian centers make crucial breaks to influence the course of the game. We are told by the Allende crowd that there is no space in modern rugby, so your centers are there to crash up the ball. And yet yesterday there was lots of space.

As far as the Lions centers is concerned this can in part be attributed to the slow line speed of the Aussies, their Achilles heel in the Lions’ fightback. The.Bok center defense is way better..

But the Lions weren’t half bad themselves and Ikitau and Suaalii found space, especially in the first half.

The good news is center play, one of the glories of the game, isn’t quite dead yet. And if we have the courage to try the likes of Willemse at 12 we could add a dimension to our game

Centre play is definitely not dead or Gay….well maybe DDA is Gay, we just don’t know it yet:)

But space will always be there to be exploited if our centre pairing is dialed in and ready to exploit it…

This is where Willemse will excel, if he gets allowed to excel there. I do not think it’s worth it to play him at 12 in a similar role as DDA.

That would be a total waste and total fuck up from Dr. Lucky…..

then rather leave him at 15 where he joins Backline play seamlessly. creates and offloads for the wings in anycase more than DDA!

I’m confused I saw one nice half break by the Oz 13 thats it

You’re not confused Dave you have vision problems. Cataracts?

That’s 4 defenders beaten for both Aussie centers…2 for each of the Poms. 2 clean breaks and an average per carry for the Pom centers of 5 meters per carry.

That means fuck all Aki was crash bash the direct route nothing special and certainly not attacking space

Wrong…Aki had one clean break in his 6 runs

And the centers distributed the ball 19 times.

I don’t recall a single clean break by Aki that did not involve running through people

Our centres did plenty of distributing in the last 4 tests

I'm concerned that you consider that Barbie and Georgia games to be Test matches, Dave.

I feel so sorry for the Stormers when DDA comes back from Japan. You know he's gonna be 34 then and will use his rep to play for two seasons there.

...and I'm sure you can't wait for that to happen Moz haha.

I'll excuse you for switching allegiance to the Bulls or Lions for that period.

Well you have to play what’s in front of you and it’s pointless measuring anything that happened ages ago so my reference is the last time we played

Dave…..Ali ran through several people, most notably Joe Frazier and George Foreman

:)

It's amazing that the Aussie centers achieved anything at all with the static ball they got from Lynagh.

Tom Lynagh is not that bad Pakie, he had a off day that’s all….

I've only seen him in the two Lions tests MP, and he did nothing a club flyhalf couldn't do. Adds absolutely nothing positive to the Aussie balance sheet.

Agreed he looks shit and a complete physical liability

I reckon with an assertive 10 they would have won that 2nd test

Definitely wouldn't have hurt their chances. Selecting Lynagh again after his no show in the first test was the most perplexing selection of the whole thing. Wonder if dad has some influence behind the scenes.

Yeah I thought Schmidt was more savvy than that

He did a good job of making the Aussies more competitive in the 2nd test but fucked up with his flyhalf selection

Ok then Name this assertive Flyhalf you rather want that’s in the OZ squad?

James O'Connor

Even Ben Donaldson would have been a better call. Anyone who can take it to the line every so often to keep the defense honest and get some pace on the ball. Lynagh just stood rooted to the spot and passed the ball on to the next guy the entire game. Everyone outside him had to make a standing start.

Will James O,Connor be staying with the Squad? I thought he was only there for the Lions series….

And Ben Donaldson is not bad at all, but the loss of Noah Lolesio was quite a hit for OZ…

Saffy, yes, it is true. I was also surprised when I saw him break the line and actually make about 30m. From in their own half, be it around the half way or 10 meter line and then made a great surge. Ending up just around the Ausie 22. I thought he was slow as indeed the Ausies were able to get through the midfield. At 35 showed something I never saw him do, clean line break.

What the Aussies did well was to fold the BIL defence in and get space out wide. Wobblies very unlucky, but their team is not the same quality it once was.

This is gross BS spreading. Center performances ha since 1995 followed the same pattern in South Africa - we never had gragt centers in SA since then and now suddenly center pla went dead in SA. We had De Villiers and Fourie that was better then the rest of the bunch and hey dd score ties - but the chronic situation is the Springbok backline were plagued by kicking idiots at flyhalf that reduce the centers to be of no real value - while tryscoing and especially backline ty scoring to the minimum/

In 2015 we had the classic story that the way the Springboks played dead backline rugby was :Traditional Springbok Rugby.

So come along Etasmus and suddenly the backline playe started to score trie based on backline attacks and no Suddenly Tradisional Rugby is not been played and advocated by Mozart and hes arted the 20th thead on the issue of De Allende this month. That is the ridiculous part of the BS being spread on site by idiots, Erasmus broght in Browne to help further development in attacking rugby - but the idiots think that iy changed nothing - because hey di not want to see what happens in tests,

What t hy really want is get back to the time of White, Meyer and Coetzee when tryscoribng wa a abomination and never planned to happen and never played attacking rugby through any givens eason/

They want a person with no idea of rugby to replace De Allende and sets negative records whenever he is in teams and if that happens they would enjoy the losses the Springboks suffer because that would help them in thei hate campaign against Erasmus.

. .

Take a pooiertjie Clever.

Together with a Cup of tea and a Marie Biscuit….

Hahaha…..maybe two Marie biscuits with a sliver of butter in between .