DUAL international Michael O'Connor believes Australian schoolboy sensation Kurtley Beale has the potential to be a bolter for the Wallabies in the 2007 World Cup in France.
Beale, 16, has attracted rave reviews playing five-eighth for famous Sydney rugby nursery St Joseph's College, whose First XV is undefeated in two years.
A member of the NSW Waratahs junior academy, Beale is expected to join the Super 14 team when he leaves school at the end of next year. That would give him a window of opportunity to press his claims for a place in the Wallabies' World Cup squad.
"Kurtley Beale is one of the most exciting young players to come through for a long time," O'Connor said.
"Kurtley is a good player, a beauty. One of the finest prospects at number 10 we've had for a long time."
O'Connor, who made his Test debut for the Wallabies against Argentina in 1979 the year after leaving school, said young players today developed faster than in his day.
"The work the kids are doing now they are being accelerated," O'Connor said.
"He will be 19 then (2007 World Cup). I played my first Test just before I turned 19. The development this kid has had, he's been accelerated.
"With the amount of football and intense training he will have, I've got no qualms about it at all about him going (to France)."
Beale has been compared to Wallabies legend Mark Ella, with whom O'Connor played before he switched to rugby league in 1983.
"My initial thought is that Kurtley is far more athletic. He has very good pace," O'Connor said. "That sixth sense that Mark had, I haven't seen anyone else with that.
"He is a lot fitter than Mark. This kid is an athlete. He takes the ball to the line. He loves to run with the ball. He wouldn't have the creativity of Mark Ella, but he is more athletic."
Wallabies coach Eddie Jones, who significantly will be going along to watch Beale play in the schoolboy Test, said he had no philosophical objections to picking an 18-year-old in the 2007 World Cup squad.
"The only reason we've gone away from playing younger players is because of professionalism," Jones said. "Before that, Australia always played 18- and 19-year-olds in Test matches."
But in the professional era, he said, it was more difficult for teenage players to demonstrate that they were equipped and ready for Test football because they were not coming up against top-line international players in club football.
As well, Jones said, players were staying longer in the game, Test teams were becoming more settled and there were fewer openings for young superstars.
"And before professionalism, 18- and 19-year-olds weren't that far physically inferior to the older blokes but now you have professionals training full-time and it takes the younger players a bit longer to catch up."
Beale played rugby league in Mount Druitt in Sydney's western suburbs before attending St Joseph's and making the school's First XV when he was only 15.
He is acutely aware of the great expectations that he will one day become a Wallaby, but he seems to be dealing with the pressure well.
"That's the expectation," Beale said yesterday of playing for the Wallabies. "I'd love to. It would be a dream come true. I just have to take it step by step.
"Before big games there are articles in the paper. I felt I had to step up and I felt the pressure. Now I don't worry about it. I just try to play my normal game."
Beale said he was shocked when rugby commentators started comparing him to Ella, who retired from Test rugby in 1984, five years before he was born.
"When you are compared to one of the all-time greats it is unbelievable," Beale said. "You can't even describe it."
But Beale, who has watched videos of Ella playing on the Wallabies' historic 1984 Grand Slam tour, does not try to emulate his playing style.
"I don't want to copy anyone," he said. "I want to invent my own game. I want to be different.
"I want to play my own game, taking it to the line and creating space out wide." Beale is preparing to play for the Australian Schoolboys against New Zealand Schools at Viking Park in Canberra on Saturday.
The Australian
