Former Wallabies’ coach Alan Jones has ripped into Robbie Deans and the Wallabies, saying that sometimes you’re “better off being not coached than badly coached”.
Jones, the last Australian coach to beat the All Blacks at Eden Park in 1986, told LiveSPORT this morning that there was no other way of putting it, and “always anticipated this would happen”.
But the outspoken Jones who has never been backward in coming forward didn’t stop at the attack on Deans, saying that “the system here (Australia) is a failure and the players are suffering”.
“We could have played the game till midnight and we wouldn’t have won,” said Jones.
He said that unless something dramatic changes – and he can’t see that happening – there are going to be all sorts of problems for Australia in the return leg of the Rugby Championship and Bledisloe Cup this Saturday night.
It’s a myth, he says, that Australia doesn’t have a squad of great players.
“It’s an attempt to explain away why we won (as opposed to the current team losing).”
But it comes down to training, and how the Aussie team are training. “We don’t have people who can catch and pass a ball… we are spending more time in the gym than with a football.”
He says that many of the players in the Australian team believe that there’s a preoccupation with trying to avoid defeat rather than win.
He went on to say that “Deans is out of his depth” and that Deans wasn’t the reason that Canterbury was strong during his tenure.
“The problem is that the structure is wrong… We’ve got head coaches and backs coaches, forwards coaches and kicking coaches… God knows who the players take their instructions from,” he says.
He believes the team won’t improve until there’s consistency in selection but he doesn’t believe at all that Deans is the right man for the job.
When asked what advice he would give to Deans, Jones says: “Shut up. I’d tell him to shut up. Just lead the team off the bus and let them go. Put them on the paddock and let them organise it… stay home. Stay in bed.
“We’ve got the cattle but it’s a matter of how we use it.".
He described the gap between the All Blacks and the Wallabies as being "very wide".
He says a whole reassessment needs to be conducted into Australian rugby.
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