WALLABIES COACH ROBBIE Deans has had to defend his team selection in the face of heavy criticism following his side’s defeat to Samoa yesterday.

Unsurprisingly, the Australian media were quick  to put the knife in, with a host of former international stars knocking the coach for fielding a weakened team. Wallabies legend David Campese spoke to the Sydney Morning Herald:

You just can’t give guys Test caps for the sake of giving them Test match experience. It’s wrong.

However, Campese’s fellow World Cup winner Tim Horan was quick to dismiss the notion that the 32-23 upset had been entirely down to team selection. “It would be easy to say Samoa’s stunning upset victory was helped by the fact some of Australia’s frontline players were not selected, but that would be letting the hosts off lightly. They were embarrassed,” he said in the Telegraph.

But Horan was also quick to point out that this result should kickstart Australia into action.

I hope this result stings the Wallabies…If there was complacency in the Australian camp, it is surely gone now.

Meanwhile, Deans said the focus should be on the performance and not the team selection.

It’s more about the fact that we lost. It’s more about the fact that we didn’t play well. Had we not done either of those two things, the reaction may have been different.

The New-Zealand born coach had rested several key players from the Queensland Reds, who had been involved in the Super Rugby final the week before.

From our perspective, we had no choice. The Reds didn’t come in until Monday night. They’d (Reds) had an enormous campaign that finished … we then gave them a window to recover out of necessity – and obviously chose a combination based on that fact.

The Wallabies face South Africa in the Tri-Nations curtain-raiser next weekend in Sydney, with their big names expected to return to the starting 15.

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