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Jake Gordon beats Tate McDermott in race for Wallabies No. 9 jersey

(Photo by Chris Hyde/Getty Images)

Jake Gordon has won the race to wear the vacant Wallabies halfback jersey after overcoming a knee injury ahead of the opening test against France in Brisbane on Wednesday night.

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With regular No. 9 Nic White out injured, Queensland’s Tate McDermott looked in line for a starting test debut on home turf at Suncorp Stadium.

But coach Dave Rennie instead opted for the mature head of Gordon, who will turn 28 on game eve.

The NSW Waratahs No.9 injured his knee in the penultimate game of Super Rugby Trans-Tasman, putting the three-test France series in severe doubt.

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It was a big blow for the halfback, who was in career-best form.

But he recovered more quickly than expected to earn his second Test start, after being in the XV to face Italy in Padua on Australia’s spring tour in 2018, winning 26-7.

It will be Gordon’s sixth test cap.

Rennie will confirm the rest of his line-up at 12.30pm AEST, with the biggest question mark over who will partner Gordon in the halves.

Reds playmaker James O’Connor is set to be ruled out with a groin injury paving the way for Rebel Reece Hodge to make his third start in the No. 10 jersey or 21-year-old Noah Lolesio.

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The Brumbies young gun made his test debut at five-eighth last year against the All Blacks in an unhappy outing with the Wallabies pummelled 43-5.

Veteran Matt Toomua is also expected to be ruled out with a neck injury, with a new centre pairing set to be named.

There is competition for a back row spot too, with Harry Wilson and Rob Valetini paired together at their locked-down Gold Coast training base after waging war for the Reds and Brumbies respectively this season.

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Barry Williams 30 minutes ago
Can 'great' Gibson-Park best 'freakish' Dupont in scrum-half clash for the ages?

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JW 44 minutes ago
Northern sides would toil in Super Rugby? The numbers say different

but Game Duration was over 112 minutes!

No it wasn’t, I checked that and a few other 6N games. IrevSctoland was around that number. Oh, unless you include the 15min half time, year that’d be the right number.


France still played, and were advantaged by, a very high tempo that game.

FYI Opta doesn’t do work-rest because they believe ball-in-play is far more accurate and inclusive.

It’s in their WRC media info sheets, but if you mean they no longer bother including it, I’d have to agree given it’s absence. Like I said, it was a bit of an eyesore and BIP just ‘looked’ much nicer.


None of these if used as arguments for and against has any relevance to the worth of using ‘game duration’ (which I assume is what W2R was devided by the number of “plays"?), it’s pure science that expending energy over a shorter period is going to have you more fatigued. You can’t dispute that. If you were to argue that BIP correlates to the exact same data/stats/findings/concepts that I’m talking about, then that would be very interesting and I’d have to go back over the data to verify that.


You should also note that the new injury protocol will worsen the ball in play stat, as they keep the clock ticking while theres no action, where in the past the ref would have immediately blown his whistle to stop the clock, then walk over to the injured play to see whats up. The clock would only have started again once teams are ready to restart, so each time they would have saved 10 or 20 secs of milling around and that goes back in to BIP time (roughly half right).

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LONG READ
LONG READ ‘Dupont may return just as fast and even wiser and smarter. France, and the world, hopes so’ ‘Dupont may return just as fast and even wiser and smarter. France, and the world, hopes so’
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