KEY POINTS:
Flanker Jerry Collins joined the growing public list of frustrated but accepting All Blacks as he spoke yesterday about his stop-go season.
"You'd be bullshitting yourself if you said you weren't, but sometimes it is just the nature of the game," the workaholic loose forward said. "You can't expect to play every week, you've just got to take it on the chin like everyone else does."
Collins follows Aaron Mauger and Keven Mealamu who have expressed thoughts about the effects of the selection rotation system on their form.
He also suggested that the Wallabies or Springboks would not be challenging the work of Richie McCaw if they had an openside flanker of such quality.
"If you are the coach of the other side you are always going to come up with some distraction or highlight some point about the other team's game. Obviously if I was playing in the other side I would say the same thing.
"When you become good at what you do everybody becomes a bit more jealous of how you are doing it and it seems at the moment that people are picking away at the way Richie plays and if they can't find a weakness they make up an excuse or some plan that he is offside and referees are letting him get away with it."
Meanwhile, assistant coach Steve Hansen hoped Welsh referee Nigel Owens would be more forceful in his scrum rulings than South African Marius Jonker was in the All Blacks' 20-15 defeat at the MCG.
"A lot of what Australia will want to do will be governed by the guy in the middle, his attitude to the scrummage," Hansen said. "They won't want to scrum because they didn't want to scrum last time."
