Tackling our Wallaby woes

TODAY The Chronicle sport team discuss the World Cup demise of the Wallabies.

Wallabies captain Michael Hooper arrives at Sydney International Airport in Sydney.

GLEN McCULLOUGH: The sad slide of the Wallabies has been years in the making with no-one it seems capable of or bothered in trying to arrest the problem.

It appears we now accept mediocrity as the norm.

I haven’t got a clue what the problem is but I’m pretty sure it’s not lack of player ability.

One thing evident is the rest of the world has caught up with us and in some cases gone past Australia.

Who could have possibly imagined during our golden rugby days, Argentina would be beating us in a Test match.

That is no slight on the Argentinians. Good luck to them.

It’s becoming almost too difficult to beat them, so perhaps it’s time to join them.

Bring in a Kiwi coach.

JASON GIBBS: Ego and culture.

We need to cast aside our ego in order to develop the right culture.

It’s all very obvious I know but guess what? Michael Cheika put his ego in front of the Wallabies by having his teams play a brand of football that simply wasn’t practical.

Everyone likes to think and talk about beautiful football.

More specifically long-term Wallabies fans will get all misty-eyed as they start talking about “running rugby” and the good old days when we a dominant World Cup force.

Running rugby is dead though or at least it should be as far as the Wallabies are concerned.

The best teams in world rugby build their performances around possession and more importantly territorial dominance.

It doesn’t always look pretty but it gets results.

They earn the right to spread the ball wide in the attacking third by doing the hard yards.

The Wallabies don’t play that kind of football though.

I honestly believe we have the players to be successful but we haven’t had the coach to make the most of talent.

As I said in my Magic Spray column on Friday - the best system is the one that gets the best out of the players.

It’s a simple as that.

SEAN TEUMA: How long’s a piece of string?

If there are any positives to come out of last weekend’s debacle against England, is that it’s given a reality check into just how far off the pace the Wallabies really are.

I think a lot of back-patting took place after the Bledisloe Cup success against New Zealand earlier in the year, before being thumped in their very next game.

It appears to me that they’ve become accustomed to mediocrity at the moment, and if there’s any truth in the murmurs about former coach Michael Cheika and boss Raelene Castle having a public spat, then that stings far greater than any on-field performance.

The word culture is thrown around commonly in sporting terms, but it applies more than ever in this instance, with the Wallabies looking like they have, to be quite frank, a rubbish one.

If I were to make any changes, Castle would be gone, and I wouldn’t be in a rush to bring back Cheika either.

Blow the thing up, start again and set a goal of making the final in 2023, and finally winning a Bledisloe Cup.

Get rid of the rules around overseas players and the massive hoops they need to jump in order to wear the green and gold.

If they’re good enough and in the best 23, pick them.

The Wallabies certainly aren’t in a good enough position to be turning down players at this moment in time.