Thomas Waldrom key in Exeter Chiefs' success, says Will Greenwood
Monday 25 January 2016 16:05, UK
Will Greenwood has championed Exeter No 8 Thomas Waldrom after the Chiefs booked their place in the Champions Cup quarter-finals.
Waldrom inspired Exeter to a 33-17 victory over the Ospreys to reach the knockout stages of the competition for the first time in their history.
The 32-year-old scored twice in the Pool 2 clash, including the 78th-minute try that gave the Devon club the points difference they needed to progress.
Although Waldrom failed to make Eddie Jones' Six Nations squad, Greenwood believes it is the No 8's age and not his ability or form that prevents him from causing a stir on the international stage.
"He's either wearing an invisibility cloak or he's one of the finest rugby players ever to have played," said Greenwood. "He's the wrong shape, he's enormous and he's wearing an orange scrum cap.
"How did the Ospreys not see him coming? I mean not just [the try] but all day.
"His ability to find angles, to find weak spots, to find blind spots, to understand when a defence is scrambling and going the wrong way and their bodies have moved and shifted - he goes against the grain.
"If ever anyone lives the line 'when most are zigging then you zag', it is Thomas Waldrom."
Fellow Pool 2 side Clermont didn't have the same luck as they crashed out of the Champions Cup after getting their sums wrong in a dramatic 37-28 defeat at the hands of Bordeaux-Begles.
Last year's finalists would have progressed through to the knockout stages with a losing bonus point had they realised the significance of a last-gasp penalty awarded to them in front of the posts.
Instead of going for goal, scrum-half Morgan Parra ran the ball as he chased a fifth try, a mistake that Greenwood can't underpin the responsibility for.
"I checked the timings today. Exeter were 15, 16 points clear with five or six minutes to go against the Ospreys. Clermont must have known that, the coaching staff must have known that," said Greenwood.
"So here's the deal. Who's not told? Do the coaches not know what's happening in the other game? Have the coaches found that out and have they passed the message on to the players and have the players not understood the ramifications of the decision? Or has Parra had a brain fart?
"One of those things has happened - they didn't know or they did know and they told them and Parra has ignored them."
Greenwood likened the situation to the Premier League finish that saw Manchester City win the title at the expense of Manchester United on the back of an injury-time Sergio Aguero goal.
"When Aguero scores that goal against QPR, you went to Man United who were at the Stadium of Light with Sunderland, and they are all on their phones and their faces drop. [Sir Alex] Ferguson's face went through the floor as they realised what had happened," Greenwood said.
"The converse of that, the news got through to Exeter. Tony Roe, who has invested umpteen squillion pounds to take basically a Carlisle United to the Champions League, has taken Exeter Chiefs into the quarter-finals of Europe and the faces were beaming and the tomahawk chop was going."
If there is one team that knows what it takes to excel on the European stage, is Toulon.
Bernard Laporte's side have been below-par so far in the competition and faced the prospect of leaving the competition in the pool stages before Bryan Habana capitalised on a wayward David Denton pass just short of the hour mark against Bath.
An away quarter-final against Dan Carter's impressive Racing 92 awaits the three-time champions, although Greenwood admits a lot can change between now and that monster clash.
He said: "A cat has nine lives, Toulon have used up three in 14 days, the double header game they had against Bath because of the rearranged fixture, and the game against Wasps they scraped home with the Drew Mitchell try.
"They went through again as a best runner-up and yet they go to Racing and what do they have in April? They get [Matt] Giteau back.
"Toulon just need Giteau to just give them the control and the aura and the belief and then the slight bonus might be that Leigh Halfpenny might come back in and smash them over.
"Surely not, surely Toulon can't win. I've written them off every Saturday for the last three weeks and they are clinging on."
