Change in pitch annoys Cheika
MICHAEL Cheika’s Wallabies have copped another classic Scottish rugby stitch-up by being barred from their boggy training field in Edinburgh and being offered a sloping lacrosse field as a farcical replacement.
The sham forced on the Wallabies under grey skies in the bleak Scottish capital was pulled just 90 minutes before the team was to start their most important and physically intense session of the week to prepare for Sunday’s Test at Murrayfield.
Wallabies hooker Stephen Moore, preparing for his 129th and last Test against Scotland, put the situation in damning perspective: “It was probably one of the poorest surfaces I’ve ever seen actually.”
The cancellation by the groundsman at the University of Edinburgh’s Peffermill grounds came after initial advice that the Wallabies would be able to go fullbore to train away the disappointment and dodgy try calls that dogged their losing day at Twickenham last weekend.
Instead, the Wallabies will have to follow their “no excuses” mantra after being forced to make do with a limited training run on artificial grass and restricted drill work on the field’s narrow in-goal areas.
In 2004, then-Wallabies coach Eddie Jones was staggered when claiming Murrayfield had been narrowed by 5m overnight to “the under-16s pitch”.
He figured the narrowminded Scots, in their bad old days, had conveniently found a way to hem in Australia’s dangerous wing men.
It didn’t work with Clyde Rathbone (two) and Lote Tuqiri scoring three tries in Australia’s 31-14 win.
An exasperated Cheika jumped on the phone while his team took a break for lunch but the alternatives declined were a sloping perimeter hockey field that made Lord’s Cricket Ground, with its 2.5m drop, look completely flat and an outside field at Murrayfield.
The in-goals were so limited yesterday that skipper Michael Hooper and his players found themselves turning in the winter leaves and trees beyond the deadball line.
“Well, it was a little disappointing. It felt like the Amazing Race a bit there, darting around different fields,” Moore said when comparing it to the reality show where teams race from city-to-city.
“It was very slippery and difficult to get any purchase. We had to do our best on the artificial surface.”
size
of an