Keith Wood and Australian legend George Gregan dropped in for Wednesday Night Rugby on Off The Ball.
Wood was expressing his admiration for much of how Australia utilised their rugby players and, indeed, their athletes.
The former Ireland hooker felt Ireland's principle of attempting to follow the All Blacks was wrong and Australia bore more similarities to Ireland as a rugby playing nation.
"In Australia," began Wood."It’s similar to Ireland, some of the great athletes play other sports."
Wood then imagined having some GAA greats switch to the oval ball: "You’d just love to take some of the great gaelic footballers and manoeuvre them over into a rugby backline.
"It’s the way they make use of their players. If they have a player who is a really good player, even if he isn’t in the right position that doesn’t seem to matter in Australia.
"They will always get the best players onto the field. I always like that there was an 'interchangeability' about it."
Although guest of the show, George Gregan played almost his entire career at scrum-half, Keith Wood admires the way Australia always got their best backs on the pitch.
"Now not with George as a nine and George was a world-class nine from pretty much the first days he started playing, but all the other players moved across the backline.
"So you have players who played at 10, 15 or 12 or Matt Giteau who played at nine and 10 and 12," remembered Wood.
"Suddenly you had this ability to make certain that you had players who were leaders who could understand the game incredibly well.
"Really good footballers who would be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat because they just got all of their class players on the field."
Ward or Campbell
The Ward versus Campbell debate was the
Humphreys v O'Gara of Ireland in the '70s and '80s, Keith Wood reckons that debate would not have happened in Australia.
"I often thought of the Tony Ward and Olly Campbell, the conversation that we used to have over out-halves in the late '70s in Ireland.
"They would never have been fighting with each other, they would always have been on the same team in Australia. They would have wanted to have made certain to get the best guys on the field.
"Given the amount of players Australia had, they were the ones we should follow. They were smart, they played smart rugby all of the time.
"Partly as well to do with the Australian Institute of Sport, back in that time, they were ahead of the game in a lot of the physiological side of things. We weren’t.
"I thought for us they were the ones to go and look at."
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