Of course the aim of this game – sports journalism – is to spot the theme early. What’s happening? What’s the pattern? Who’s hot? Who’s not? Who’s rot?
I defy anyone to have picked it after the first half of the Waratahs vs Reds match at the Sydney Football Stadium on Friday night. The whole thing was a mish-mash of bash, biff, barge and bungles, back and forth, backs and forwards, interspersed with occasional busts of seriously clever play.
On the one hand, Tahs like Joseph Aukuso Suaalii, Harry Potter and most particularly Max Jorgensen showed through for their sheer class, constantly threatening the Queensland line, with no-look passes and jinks that left the defence in tatters.
Max Jorgensen scores his second try.Credit: Getty Images
On the other hand, when Queensland put the ball up twenty minutes in, not a single Waratah shouted what we were all taught in the U/12s, on pain of doing twenty push-ups: shout “MINE!” The ball dropped in a postcode all its own, and the invaders from the north recovered it easily.
All that, and despite three tries by the Tahs in the first forty minutes – including an absolute pearler by Jorgensen waltzing through the Queensland defence in a manner to make Matilda herself proud – the Reds refused to bow to their betters, and scored two great tries of their own, and go to the break only 17-12 down.
Surely, however, the second half would deliver a theme?
Not in the first 25 minutes, it didn’t. It’s not that nothing happened. Just nothing memorable happened. The only thing it proved was that both Queensland’s Fraser McReight and NSW’s Charlie Gamble are both worth three men a piece.
At last, with fourteen minutes to go, the game came to life.
With the Waratahs scoring to the right of the posts after clever lead-up work by Gamble, the goodies were up 24-12 and Queensland had to go hard or go home.
And they did.
But – go you good things! – the locals proved more than a match for the yokels. With the game opening up, we got to the try of the match, the one that proved that NSW were just too damn classy, after all.
With nigh his first touch of the ball, the reserve five-eighth Jack Debreczeni did such a pin-point kick it could have knocked the cigarette out of a kookaburra’s mouth at 30 metres, but instead landed in the hands of Charlie Gamble on the fly, with at least six centimetres of space to work with! Though tackled, somehow Gamble stayed in, and at full stretch, on his back, flicked the ball back to Jorgensen on the burst. Try! Try! Try for your life, I’ll tell a man it is.
With Tahs half Teddy Wilson going over in the corner a short time later, to bring the final score to 36-12, we had a theme, at last!
[Journo leans in to the typewriter, writing that theme with confidence, as if it was going to be this all along.]
Tahs too good! Too strong. They score their first win over Queensland in Sydney in a decade! Season off to a great start, while Reds are stinking up the joint!
Something like that, anyway.
Look, it’ll do. Both sides have plenty to work on for next week, but the Waratahs show they at least have the raw material to do something this season, and we can still live in hope that they can give the comp a nudge.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
