Ex-Wallabies captain Geoff Shaw to mentor Junior Wallabies

The man who helps mow the grass at Ballymore has been asked to play a vital role with the Junior Wallabies as a mentor.

Former Wallabies captain Geoff Shaw, who will take on a mentoring role with the Junior Wallabies this year. Picture: Rugby Australia

The man who helps mow the grass at Ballymore has been asked to play a vital role with the Junior Wallabies as a mentor for the coming season.

But unlike Nathan Lyon, who was plucked from being a groundsman at Adelaide Oval to become the greatest off spinner in Australian cricket history, Geoff Shaw has done it in reverse. He took up mowing the grass at the ground he once graced as a player long after he had retired from a rugby career during which he played 27 times for Australia.

In nine of those Tests he was captain, winning six of them.

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Cutting the grass at Ballymore — where he played the bulk of his 47 games for Queensland — seemed about the only thing Shaw – who answers to no other name than “Bunter” – hadn’t done in his life in rugby.

Born in 1948, the year in which Don Bradman retired from Test cricket, Shaw started out as a centre for NSW before Maroons coach Bob Templeton lured him to Queensland, though not before he had worn the sky blue jersey in ­arguably NSW’s most infamous defeat to Queensland, in 1976.

As it happened, NSW scored the first try of the match and Shaw was loudly heard to taunt the Queenslanders as he headed back to halfway: “Guess it’s not going to be your day, boys.”

It was to be the only shot the virtual Test-strength NSW fired off that day as Queensland set about shedding decades of inferiority, winning 42-4.

Despite his quip, the next year Shaw became an invaluable member of a Queensland side that for a brief, shining moment was regarded as the best provincial team in the world.

Post-football, Shaw carved out a role as a respected administrator, first with the QRU as an assistant coach to the then Reds head coach John Connolly, and then with the Australian Rugby Union, playing an important role in the planning for the 2003 World Cup.

Then from 2010-17, he was named program manager of the Classic Wallabies.

It was Rugby Australia director of rugby Scott Johnson who persuaded Shaw, now 71, to help out with the Junior Wallabies.

“We sat on the fence at Ballymore just talking and he said: ‘Go home and talk to your wife about it’,” Shaw recalled. “And she said I’d be mad if I didn’t do it.”

So, in the vital follow-up year, when Junior Wallabies coach Jason Gilmore will attempt to go one better than he did at the Under-20 World Cup in Argentina where his side lost to France by a point in the final, Shaw will be with the team every step of the way, attempting to pass on some of his knowledge.

“I’m not going to be telling the kids how I used to walk barefoot through the snow to get to school,” said Shaw. Possibly because there wasn’t much snow on the ground when he was growing up in Kiama.

But while he is aware the aspiring Wallabies of tomorrow “do need to get out a bit more”, he will also argue they should be spared some of their rugby “homework”.

As his own story demonstrates, sometimes rugby players just have to back themselves.