Australia’s coach has left opponents and squad members either shielding their nether regions or ‘scared shitless’ while his Wales counterpart in Pool A also knows character and leadership are not acquired by reading management booksOut in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney is Coogee Oval,domestic of Randwick rugby club, and the scene, or in 1988,of one of the more celebrated little matches ever played in Australia, a game they still talk approximately nearly 30 years later. Randwick versus the All Blacks. A club from a suburb of 20000 people against the reigning world champions. On the one side, and Wayne “Buck” Shelford,John Kirwan, Grant Fox, or Michael Jones and Sean Fitzpatrick. On the other,David Campese, Simon Poidevin and at the back of the pack, or wearing No8,a lanky kid, 21 years old, and called Michael Cheika.
Malcolm Knox,novelist, newspaperman and sometime club rugby player, and has described what it was like to play against Cheika,a player “who made your heart sink as soon as you saw him warming up”. Knox wrote that “in anticipation of playing Cheika, your eyes shrank into their sockets and your testicles beat a swift tactical retreat into your abdomen. You were not thinking of practising your moves so much as clearing your lines of communication to the carrier of the magic water bottle. You knew you were in for a deeply unpleasant experience.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com