adminBRISBANE. — Two players, two different teams. Each desperately searching for redemption in the eyes of their fans. But with tomorrow night’s Castle Lager Rugby Championship fixture evenly balanced, even if they end up on the winning side, will Quade Cooper or Zane Kirchner succeed in fulfilling their goals?
The duo have been at the centre of selection talk all week long, with their respective coaches going to great lengths to talk up their strengths, underline their value to the team and to remind their public critics that they are more than the sum of their parts.
You couldn’t find two players who are more different on the rugby spectrum than these two, but there are startling similarities ahead of tomorrow’s game in the way they have been savaged in the court of public opinion. Both desperately want to prove their critics wrong.
In Cooper’s situation, much of it is self inflicted — his “toxic” comments coming at precisely the wrong time last year and causing a major rift not only with then coach Robbie Deans but with several of his teammates as well.
His much-publicised wrongdoings — often in the company of his “Generation Y” mates James O’Connor, Kurtley Beale and Digby Ioane, have won him a bad-boy image, and made him the poster boy for the boo-boys across the Tasman sea in the country where he was born.
But it isn’t surprising that the Cooper who coach Ewen McKenzie is looking for, is the Cooper who mesmerises opposition, who makes the players around him look sublime as he finds holes in defences to put them through. The rugby-genius Cooper is rarely seen these days, but has such an impact when it appears that McKenzie is willing to take the risk that the brash, bumbling Cooper doesn’t appear.
“There is no doubt the more times Quade touches the ball the better he is,” McKenzie waxed lyrical at the announcement.
“I’m certainly not going to use him as a decoy runner. We think they will kick a lot, and if he gets his hands on the ball, that’s good.
Maybe they won’t kick as much, we’ll see.”
Cooper last played at 10 for the Wallabies against Argentina on the Gold Coast last year, a game he’d rather forget as a charged-down kick cost a try and the Wallabies just squeaked home. He never played under Robbie Deans again. — Supersport.com
Online Reporter