WILL GENIA
Twickenham holds fond memories for the Wallaby, says RW’s Alan Pearey
OW OLD do you think Will Genia is? Mick Byrne is Australia’s skills coach and he didn’t have the foggiest. “I had a chat with him while I was in Paris,” the Wallaby scrum-half says. “He goes, ‘How old are you? 31, 32?’ I go, ‘No, no, I’m still 28’. People think I’m a bit older than I am.”
That’s what happens when you burst onto the scene as a pup and settle into Test rugby with indecent haste. Genia was 21 when he broke into the Wallabies and still 21 when he decided not to let his first outing at Twickenham pass unnoticed.
It was his eighth cap and you may have forgotten that some of those on duty played international rugby. England had Dan Hipkiss and Shane Geraghty in midfield, Ayoola Erinle and Duncan Bell on the bench. It was November 2009, early in the Martin Johnson management era, and Jonny Wilkinson was wearing the red rose for the first time in 18 months.
“That’s one of my favourite memories in my Wallaby career,” Genia recalls. “The atmosphere was amazing, I got to play against Jonny Wilkinson, I got to play with guys like George Smith and Matt Giteau, guys who I admired for a long, long time. And to be able to do that at such a special place as Twickenham was unreal.”
Twenty minutes in, England couldn’t reorganise after an Adam Ashley-Cooper break and Genia scored his first Test try. He was Man of the Match in an 18-9 win.
From then he could do no wrong. Within a year the Papua New Guinea-born Queenslander was leading the Reds and picking up Player of the Year accolades from team-mates and fans. In 2011, he captained Australia for the first time and was shortlisted for World Player of the Year, and in 2013 he was terrifying the Lions.
As happens so often, injuries halted his momentum. He avoids road running nowadays because of the knee cartilage he has lost, and ankle damage opened the door to Nick Phipps in 2014, when Genia was a replacement on Australia’s European tour.
But you always felt Genia, who was given his big break as a teenager by Eddie Jones, would come back with more. In this year’s Rugby Championship, he made a ton of breaks and metres, kicked intelligently, scored and made tries, missed only five tackles and outleapt big back-row forwards like Juan Manuel Leguizamón. “He’s improved with every match,” says
HWallaby great Michael Lynagh. “He’s back to being one of the leaders in the team.” In a side with so many headaches – penalty concessions, yellow cards, ruck sloppiness – Genia has been the ibuprofen. The fact he played 433 of the 480 Championship minutes showed how much Michael Cheika depends on him, and perhaps it was Phipps’s frustration at being so obviously the No 2 that he pushed over the Pumas’ physio at Twickenham.
Soon the Wallabies will be back on England’s turf, and it has been a familiar and happy hunting ground. The 3 December match will be the men in gold’s seventh at HQ in little over a year and they have won all but one of them. Only Italy of the Six Nations clan will be denied a crack at Cheika’s team on this tour, with this month’s Scotland clash a standout reprisal of last year’s RWC quarter-final.
“Scotland are always tough. I’ve played them four times and won two, lost two. They always turn up to play because I feel like they see us as an opportunity to knock off a southern hemisphere side.”
Genia will take some shifting. He feels reinvigorated as a player, the knee problems that prevented him playing for the first eight months of this year behind him. He’s raring to perform for Wallaby coach Cheika.
“Mate, he shows a lot of belief in players. I enjoy the fact that he instils that belief because he genuinely believes in you as an individual. That blows through to me as a player, it helps me have confidence.
“I’m fitter, stronger, more experienced than the player I was in 2009. Not as raw. With experience comes a better understanding of how to be more efficient on the field, how to handle situations.
“I’m really enjoying myself, working hard, and feel I’ve still got my best rugby ahead of me. I’m enjoying feeling the pain in games, that’s what’s driving me at the moment. And I still love playing. If I see an opportunity I look to take it and back myself.”
He has a new life in Paris, where he, wife Vanessa and baby Olivia moved to in the week of the terrorist attacks a year ago. “It was scary and I was obviously really sad for those who lost their lives. We were just fortunate we weren’t near what was going on. “We love Paris, it’s a beautiful city. I have two more years on my contract at Stade (Français). If they think I’m old now they’ll probably
think I’m way too old then!”