'We expect a fierce battle at set piece': Chelsea Bremner prepares to face England

When Dick Marks was in charge at the AIS there was a massive emphasis on coach education at all levels, but now it seems to have evaporated. They are the bedrock of the game, esp at unpaid levels like schools and colleges.

Phil Larder once told me he went an event in Australia where 3oo new League coaches were give their accreditation at one time. By 1983 there were already 7,000 of them in Aussie thanks to Peter Corcoran.

Can rugby show hte same investment? I seriously doubt it.

As a player of league and union and follower and occasional coach at basic levels I can say it is if anything worse.

My take is that somehow or other once we had gone pro, and become a top 2 or 3 team (early naughties) the hubris took over.

At high levels (NSW and Sydney RU in my experience), the money that had previously trickled to things like coach the coaches and special days was redirected to "elite" players and (worst of all) previously unpaid board directors.

We were left with "I want to be a Wallaby" stickers!

There was an actual belief that we had become good because of some inate natural skill we had.

No acknowledgement of coaches or hard work or any activity at all outside of Private Schools.

The ant-league sentiment was palpable, and that alone drove kids playing in my son's West Habour Pirates team away from the game. They were told that they couldn't play League on Sundays and Union on Saturdays by the SRU.

Coaches (including assistant coaches like me) were told to force kids to go to Waratah games after their game. Coach the coaches was replaced by a SRU chap talking over us at training and telling the boys not to tackle low like "mungos", throw the lightest kid up in lineouts, not the tallest. There were many ridiculous things that the kids just laughed at.

The inability to pick out a good player or teach basic skills to anyone went with handing coaching responsibility at representative levels to chaps based on the school they went to, irrespective of whether they had ever played or ever coached.

The money with professionalism had the completely opposite effect to what it should have had when it came to trivial things like skills, coaching and selection.

Rave over...

But it is too much for ref to monitor. Just say players ahead of the ball cannot interfere until the kicker [or another player behind him] moves past them.

But sooner or later the truth further down the game becomes manifest and too hard to ignore, as it has now in both countries.🤕

In Durban we had one foreign raised player in the run on team. We won.

Aki's citizenship is clearly a happy day for him and his family. Do f**k off and be 'humble' and self righteous somewhere else?

Judging from the biblical whinging can we assume the RWC loss to the fatgied SA is still fresh?

What is still fresh is our glorious win in the NZ series, showing the world that once you ignore their arrogance beating NZ in NZ is no longer a biggie. Argentina have learned from it, England should have.