With one week until the Test series begins, I am relishing the battle between Will Genia and Mike Phillips, the two leading scrum-halves in the world, big occasion players who shape the destiny of a match. It will be worth the price of admission alone.
Genia is Australia’s stand-out player, a scrum-half who can shape a game even when he is below his considerable best. If the Lions contain him in Brisbane next Saturday, they will give themselves every chance of winning the first Test.
I know Genia well, with Wales having played Australia so often in the past 18 months. When we toured there last summer, he ran the first Test, scoring an outstanding try and posing a threat throughout. We spent the following week analysing his game and working out ways of stopping him.
We changed the way we defended at rucks. We had used two defenders close together around the fringes, call them A and B. They were barely half a metre apart, but in the second Test we got the second defender to stand four or five metres away, giving Genia a tempting hole to run into.
There is no way you will turn a good player in the opposition into a bad one, but what you can do is limit his effectiveness and stop him from having a profound influence on the game. We knew that Genia would not waste the opportunity to attack space, and as soon as he made his move we made sure we had the numbers to smother him, stopping him off‑load and tackling him to the ground where he could do no damage.
The second Test was far closer than the first – we lost to a last-minute penalty – and Australia scored two tries in the final two internationals having run in three in the first. We succeeded in keeping Genia quieter and that will be a prime objective of the Lions next week.
Our chief analyst, Rhys Long, who is with the Lions in Australia, made the point that Genia was an expert at detecting players who are slow in getting back to their feet after making a tackle and taking them on. This season, we have won every game when we were the quicker side to get off the floor while New Zealand are the most proficient team in the world in that area.
A player who is on the ground is out of the game and someone such as Genia, who is very quick at taking in what is around him, will exploit anyone who lingers. He is the latest in a long line of top-quality Australia scrum‑halves, a mixture of Nick Farr-Jones, a strong player, and George Gregan, a subtle operator.
Genia is not a big man, weighing 13st, but he can bench-press 350lb, which puts him among loose forwards. I am not saying Australia are a one-man team, but he is one of their two world-class players and the other, David Pocock, will miss the Test series because of injury.
Genia is unusual for a scrum-half in that he likes to drop deep when opponents have a 22 drop-out, ready to either launch a counterattack or support one. He has pace to go with his eye for a gap and links well with his full-back and wings. He is Australia’s catalyst, always on the alert.
Genia will not have his Reds half-back partner, Quade Cooper, in Brisbane, despite a clamour after the way the fly-half played against the Lions. His omission from the Wallaby squad was not a surprise given the remarks he made last year and not too much should be read into the way he played.
I enjoy watching Cooper because he looks to attack but the pressure was off him. The Lions were expected to beat the Reds and he could afford to chuck the ball around on his own line and throw some daring passes, liberties that will not be taken in the first Test.
Much has been made of the lack of strong opposition for the Lions in the build-up but Australia have not had a Test since the beginning of December. Their coach, Robbie Deans, was right to go into camp for three weeks because he needs his players together, all the more so now that they have picked up a few injuries. They missed Genia in Europe last year and for the Lions where there is not a Will, there is a way.
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