Rugby: Just a little niggle ahead of Brumbies v Rebels

There was just a little niggle in the air as the Melbourne Rebels prepared to do battle with the Brumbies.

Halfback James Tuttle returns to the Rebels line-up after 846 days out injured. Picture: Alix Sweeney

There was just a little niggle in the air as the Melbourne Rebels prepared to do battle with the Brumbies in a Super Rugby AU clash at Sydney’s Leichhardt Oval on Friday night, with both sides positioning themselves to be there at the end of the competition next month.

Right from the moment their first clash was decided, way back in 2011, by a Danny Cipriani penalty goal from a contentious scrum penalty to give Melbourne a one-point victory, there has always been tension between the two camps.

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Perhaps it stems from the fact that before the Rebels were admitted, there was talk of the Brumbies playing at least a couple of their home games in Melbourne. In recent time, the tension has come from the fact that the Brumbies and Rebels were mentioned in the same breath as merger candidates should only four Australian teams be allowed in the trans-Tasman competition. Such talk thankfully has receded following Rugby Australia’s “five or nothing” ultimatum, but it was curiously telling how unappetising the idea of a merger was to both camps.

Whatever, since the Rebels joined Super Rugby a decade ago, they have been the side that has troubled the Brumbies the most, winning eight of their 19 clashes. No other Australian side has performed better.

It began innocuously enough yesterday as Rebels coach Dave Wessels spoke about the travails of his side having been outcasts from Victoria since the start of this Super Rugby AU competition.

“We have been on tour for a long time now. It’s nearly coming up to seven weeks and every game we play in this competition is away, so we are playing under very different circumstances to the Brumbies, who every night are sleeping in their own beds. They use their own training facility,” Wessels began.

“Life is pretty cruisy in Brumby-land right now and I think Dan (Brumbies coach Dan McKellar) and his coaches have done a good job of keeping the consistency of their roster. Of all the teams, they are the least disrupted. I know they have lost Noah (Lolesio) but other than that it is really the team that has been playing all year. But when you look across the other teams, there are a lot of new faces and I think Australian rugby should be excited by that.”

McKellar kept it relatively even-keeled, but given that the Rebels had fired a shot as the Brumbies for “time wasting” when they met back in February – where the Canberra side broke a four-match losing streak by rumbling over for a late driving maul try for a 31-23 win – he couldn’t completely let it pass.

The Rebels would reach their usual ball in play time of around 32 minutes, McKellar predicted, knowing that everyone by now would be aware that the Brumbies and the Reds had the ball in play for an amazing 43 minutes in last weekend’s thrilling game.

The two coaches are good friends and their verbal parrying was just gentle thrusts with an epee, not hacks with a broadsword. Still, the repartee demonstrated how much there is at stake as both sides take different approaches to this match. The Brumbies have made two changes to their starting side, both rotations with winger Tom Wright handing over to Adam Muirhead and flanker Will Miller stepping aside for Tom Cusack.

The Rebels, by contrast, have made changes to basically every unit throughout their team – second-row, back-row, halves, centres and back three. Sadly, the change at halfback was forced by serious injury, with Ryan Louwrens forced to undergo surgery to reattach tendons after seriously damaging his bicep in the Rebels’ last outings, against the Force.

Still, the flip side was that Louwrens’s injury allowed former Queensland halfback James Tuttle to finally make it onto the Rebels’ bench for his first Super Rugby match for the club, 846 days after he last played at this level. After overcoming not one but two Achilles injuries, small wonder his Melbourne teammates accorded him a standing ovation when his name was read out in the match-day 23.

Persistence – though perhaps not quite in the Tuttle class — also has paid off for five-eighth Andrew Deegan, who will take over the playmaking role, pushing captain Matt Toomua to inside centre. Wessels wants to make sure that his side is fully match-ready if it makes the play-offs, and that means rewarding the repeatedly strong efforts of Deegan in training.

“It has been hard not to select him,” he said. “If a guy is good enough to start and may play a real pivotal role in the final, then he needs to get a correct amount of exposure leading into those finals.”