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Our Turn To Chew Will Come |
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Written by Pio Sioa
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Friday, 05 September 2008 |
The players have to be convinced or physically shown where they are, where they should go and if they have what it takes to get them to where they must go.
This seems to be the standard rationale behind the Samoa Rugby Union resolve to hone an internationally competitive national rugby team.
The New Zealand Rugby Union invitation to play the All Blacks was extended firstly to Fiji and Tonga who both turned it down .
Our SRFU seized the opportunity when it was finally extended to Samoa.
Playing the unofficial rugby champion of the world is the best yard stick the SRU brains foundation believes will go a long way towards building the Manu Samoa dream team for the next Rugby World Cup in 4 years time.
So there we are folks ! That was where everything stood leading up to the New Zealand challenge this week. We were thrashed.
Where are we now?
Our Manu Samoa boldly stepped up against the mighty men in black on Tuesday night and were canned …with a cricket score.
Embarrassing? Yep! Big time.
One avid Manu Samoa diehard tried to soften the sting of the loss by asserting that the ‘test match’ gave Samoa’s rugby a chance to bite the bullet.
Well that was no ordinary bullet and it did a 180 degree turn on us in the end. Instead of us giving it a bite the damn thing turned around and chewed us all night long.
It must have been a tank rocket rather than a .38 pistol bullet our boys bit into.
Maybe the next time the SRFU wants to expose our players teeth to any more bullets they should make sure our boys have teeth left to smile with afterwards.
Perhaps they would wish also to consider that it pays sometime to dodge the bullet rather than allow the bragging mouth to sacrifice the teeth and embarrass the whole face with a toothless look.
So we have all suffered. We are all angry. We all felt for our boys and the effort they put in. What we now have to look at seriously is whether it was worth it?
Was it educational? Yep! Very Much So!
Our Manu Samoa players lifted the hand and learned they were promoted several classes too high for their skill levels to cope.
Any lasting suspicions they may have held before the test match are now laid to rest, hopefully not in peace, especially for Coach Tuala and his staff.
Something is awfully out of sync if these fellows allow themselves a moments respite. What they now have attached to their coaching resume is a cricket score and more importantly it remains festered in the riled emotions of the team fans everywhere.
There is not going to be any escaping that.
The fans are already6 baying for blood after Tuesday, and some are calling for the heads of the Manu Samoa coaching team to be served on the platters. Cripes!!
So where now do we go from here?
This question has been asked so many times one wonders if it is not starting to sound like an irritating scratched record.
There are two basic options available to putting together a Manu Samoa team. We either pick from our own homegrown talents living in Samoa, or reach out to our players contracted overseas.
Both of those options are fraught with obstacles. Coach Tuala and his staff are in the outhouse right now because they could not get our contracted players to join the team.
Lord help us all , that is just one reality Coach Tuala’s is trying to cope with .
Everytime the Manu Samoa loses, his head or neck will always end up on the chopping block. Park it there bro! Ain’t no way you’re gonna get off soon, so get used to it.
We are now looking at setting up our own, home grown, semi-professional rugby squad. We have done that with our national rugby sevens team and it seems to be working.
The real advantage our 7’s team have is the IRB circuit where they are exposed to the kind of regular international exposure our 15 man Manu Samoa is desperate for.
But in pointing that out, we now have our own Pacific Cup tournament with Tonga and Fiji, followed by the tournament where New Zealand, Australia, Japan and of course us in the Pacific are involved.
These are all new tournaments the IRB is bankrolling for the Pacific. If we are to step back and look at what is evolving right now in our region, we are probably on the right track.
It may take a few more years to polish up what we have now but, maybe Coach Tuala and all the others with him, should try concentrating this year solely on building up our own locally based players for next year’s tournament series.
Forget the overseas contract players. If they can be freed up for the Manu Samoa next year, take that as a bonus, but the core should come from the local players.
Give it a try anyway . We’ve already suffered the embarrassment of being whipped by more than a century. We have swallowed our pride or are still trying to, so we could expose our local talents to learning from the best in the world.
What more can we lose that we haven’t lost already in our on going struggles to build our own Manu Dream team.
So we maybe biting tank rockets right now. But once we learn how to do that, .38 caliber bullets are nothing other than chewing gum.
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