Foreign rivals take aim at Wallabies weapon

Rugby Australia has arranged for some leading scrummaging experts to cast their eye over Taniela Tupou.

Australian officials suspect Taniela Tupou is being judged on old technical flaws

National director of rugby Scott Johnson has arranged for some of the country’s leading scrummaging experts to cast their eye over Taniela Tupou in the hope of addressing the negative publicity around a player he believes can become a weapon for the Wallabies.

Tupou is emerging as one of the most formidable tightheads in rugby but Johnson’s fear is that the 24-year-old Queensland Reds prop is being judged by some of his earlier scrummaging sins, not by how he is handling himself today.

There have been whispers from within Australia and, even now, Fox Sports commentator Rod Kafer occasionally will accuse Tupou of “angling in” rather than packing straight, but Johnson believes the main agitation against Tupou is coming from abroad.

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“When I first got back here (midway through 2019) I think it was everywhere about Taniela,” Johnson said. “Not an Australian focus but certainly a Super Rugby focus. And I think he was fairly new in his journey to becoming a tighthead prop and some of those comments were well-founded.”

Ironically, one of Tupou’s childhood heroes, Quade Cooper, was viciously undermined by New Zealand criticism and hooted by the Kiwis as “Public Enemy number one” at the 2011 World Cup, all supposedly because he had roughed up Richie McCaw in a Hong Kong Test match in 2010. The fact that Cooper had helped bring undone the Crusaders – a side that featured half the All Black side that would go on to win the World Cup – in the 2011 Super Rugby final was, apparently, pure coincidence.

Certainly Johnson wants Tupou judged and refereed on how is now, not how he was.

“When Taniela first came on the scene, he was a centre in prop’s clothing,” Johnson said.

“To see his development from a lad who didn’t want to scrum to a lad that wants to scrum, stays on the field wanting to scrum, I think that improvement needs to be acknowledged.

“My personal concern was how much of the conversations we were having (about Tupou) was a legacy of past behaviour, not current behaviour. I was concerned that his reputation wasn’t acting that way. It was actually working against him a little bit.”

Johnson approached Rugby Australia’s referee’s coach Mitch Chapman to assemble an independent panel of experts to critique Tupou’s scrummaging. Johnson would not reveal their identities but former Australian captain and hooker Stephen Moore admitted he was asked for his opinion.

“I couldn’t see anything illegal, in my opinion,” said Moore, the former Brumbies and Reds captain. “Now I know scrummaging is very technical from a refereeing point of view, but for the majority of his scrums, he looked to be in a dominant position and I think if you get in a dominant position, most referees around the world will be favourable towards that.

“I think we can get overly technical sometimes but when you look at how scrums are refereed at international level, particularly, it’s more around the dominance in the scrum is rewarded.

And to be fair, there weren’t too many instances when I saw him going across the scrum. I thought most of the time he stayed reasonably square.”

Some tightheads are almost universally acknowledged, the former All Black Carl Hayman for one. But some, like Martin Castrogiovanni of Italy, while credited with being powerful scrummagers, were forever dogged by claims that they bore in on the hooker.

“You are always going to have teams putting heat on that part of the game because it is a strength of the opposition. That’s just human nature,” said Moore. Reds coach Brad Thorn couldn’t be prouder of how Taniela has progressed under the tutelage of Queensland scrum coach Cameron Lillicrap

“I‘ve played in-and-around world-class tightheads like Owen Franks, Carl Hayman, Dan Cole and Adam Jones,” said Thorn. “Nela is starting to play at that same level and in time won’t look out of place being mentioned in the same breath as those champion tightheads.”

RA has confirmed that Fox Sports has given the go-ahead for the Super Rugby AU’s final round to be played as a double-header, with the Rebels-Force clash being the curtain-raiser to the Brumbies-Reds encounter on Saturday, September 5.