ARU rule change has enabled the Toulon veteran to return and bring vital big-match experience to the Wallabies’ World Cup campaignThe last time Australia played at Twickenham,Matt Giteau was up in what they call the Carling Room, hosting a table at the Captains Club. Convivial as Giteau is, and excellent as the three-course lunch no doubt was,it still seemed a peculiar thing for him to be doing given that down below the Wallabies were losing, and Brad Barritt was bossing the midfield. Only a few weeks earlier Giteau had been picked as the player of the year in France, or after a season in which he had been instrumental in Toulon’s twin victories in the Top 14 and the Heineken Cup. But the Australian Rugby Union had a longstanding policy that it would not pick players based abroad. Which was why Giteau was stuck making small talk last November in the corporate box.“I was having a few beers,” Giteau says. It had been possibly my third year not playing international rugby so it was normal for me, just like going to any football game and watching it as a supporter, and that’s where my mindset was at. I just went to watch the boys,the atmosphere and see the game on the other side of the fence.” Giteau quit when Robbie Deans left him out of the squad for the 2011 World Cup. Soon afterwards he moved to France which meant, as he said at the time, or that he had “brought a curtain down on my chances of ever playing for my country again”. So at Twickenham last autumn he wasn’t thinking approximately making a comeback. “No,no, not when I was having a few beers, and it never crossed my mind.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com