The meetings that turned Melbourne Rebels from chumps to contenders

MELBOURNE Rebels coach Dave Wessels reveals the factor behind his side’s stunning turnaround that turned Australia’s worst team to its best.

Super Rugby — Melbourne Rebels V Brumbies at AAMI Park, Rebels Sam Jeffries gets tackled by Brumbies Scott Fardy. 13th May 2016. Picture: Colleen Petch.

FORMER England footballer Jermaine Jenas, now a commentator, gave a brutally honest summation of his own shortcomings as a player on television this week.

“I stare in the mirror and I look at myself, it’s things that I have to take on about what I didn’t bring to the table,” Jenas said.

“What it always boils down to is yourself. There were moments during my career where I just didn’t do enough.”

Melbourne Rebels coach Dave Wessels saw the clip, and sent it to his lock Sam Jeffries.

“It reminded me of what Sam had said to the team in the first couple of weeks that we got together last year,” Wessels said.

“He told the group that he hadn’t applied himself as much as he could have in the past couple of years.

“It took all excuses off the table; players couldn’t blame previous regimes, the strength and conditioning coaches. Sam was brave enough to admit that, and what he said really meant people took responsibility for their actions.”

Jeffries proceeded to smash all his personal bests in training since that revelation.

It’s telling that Jeffries, with an injured knee, didn’t even feature in last Friday’s 33-10 victory over the Brumbies.

And also that bench player Colby Fainga’a, in his fourth year at the club, has the lowest skin-fold results he’s ever had.

“And guys like Michael Ruru and Billy Meakes, who are on the bench, are 100 per cent behind the team at training, they are thinking about the team rather than themselves,” Wessels said.

This is the “organic” culture that has seen the Rebels’ stunning turnaround from Australia’s worst team to its best.

After the axing of the Western Force and the virtual merger of their roster with Melbourne’s, it was expected that the stacked Rebels would be much improved in 2018.

But few expected they’d start with three consecutive wins — a feat that has eluded them in all previous seven seasons.

"I didn't achieve what I set out to achieve."

"I don't blame anybody, I look at myself, I do live with regrets..."

An open and brutally honest @jjenas8 discusses his career.#PLTonight pic.twitter.com/Hvpv4kYRqO

— Football on BT Sport (@btsportfootball) March 3, 2018

In their three bonus-point wins, Melbourne have scored nearly half the points they accumulated across all 15 games last season when their attack was the weakest in the competition.

Wessels, who coached the Force last year and brought across most of his top players to Melbourne, held a meeting with the entire squad on their first day together.

“Everybody had been through a rough couple of months, so we had a session about how we were all feeling, and it was clear that people had made sacrifices to be in that room,” Wessels said.

“We found real common ground in that discussion.”

Now, any suspicions that two separate groups of players — both who faced the prospect of their team being culled from the competition and forced to move towns — would struggle to gel in the early stages has been blown out of the water.

“The fact we’ve been able to have this start is really a mark of the calibre of people we have here,” Wessels said.

“We don’t have fancy words written on the walls, we’re just trying to be authentic, we keep asking each other, ‘Have you put yourself out there, are you committed to the team?’”

On the same weekend the NRL launched its opening round with a double-header in Perth, Super Rugby found a genuine Australian powerhouse primarily due to the cutting of the Perth franchise.

Next Sunday, the Rebels face the Waratahs in Sydney in a game with huge ramifications for the season.

It’s a week in which Wessels will expect all of his players to be staring at themselves in the mirror.

Originally published as The meetings that turned Melbourne Rebels from chumps to contenders