After orchestrating an imperfect but resounding Waratahs comeback against the Rebels in Melbourne on Friday, Beale declared he had no plans to retreat into his shell. That means the chip-and-chase, a simultaneously loved and loathed feature of his game since schoolboy days, is here to stay.

"As a kid you always want to try different things and I'm not going to stop trying different things, I always like to try to be different and try to pull off the unthinkable," Beale said.

"But in saying that [coach Michael Cheika] is very strict on how we want to play the game, to play to our identity but play within the structures. We've got the ball in motion and everyone's got a role to play, and if you step out of that role you're going to interfere with the structures and overlap. You have to be careful and you have to pick the right time to pull out some tricks."

Two games into the season, Waratahs fans have had a taste of both extremes of the Beale style: the look-away car-crash where nothing came off – including one of those chip kicks – against the Western Force and the 180-degree turnaround five days later. There were rusty edges, no doubt, but when it mattered against the Rebels, the 26-year-old's execution matched his vision.

The performance earned Beale pointed praise from his coach. "He put in a brutal chip over the top [against the Force], the guy caught it and scored, when it was never on," Cheika said after the match.

"This week he had the advantage, he saw that they were playing everyone up in the line, read the game, chipped over and that's the right play there. A lot of teams are playing 14-on-one on us now and we have to be reactive with some variation, but he did it in the right shape of the game, not just doing it and hope for the best. That's the sign that he was on tonight."

It is not just Beale being encouraged to play his way. Cheika has made interesting recruitment choices – from Will Skelton to unheralded rookie Sam Lousi, back-rower Jacques Potgieter and fullback Israel Folau – and made them work, so far.

After round one's "embarrassing" loss of face against the Force, the coach pre-empted any second guessing.

"We spoke about it beforehand in the dressing room, the natural tendency if you get beat and bad is to shrink, but we'd like to think we're the team that does the opposite of what everyone might do, so we'll go out there and try to play a bit more – as long as we've prepared for it," he said.

Beale is a direct beneficiary of his coach's brand of latitude-with-limits. There was another reason the chip kick came off on Friday: No. 8 Stephen Hoiles knew it was on.

"I play better when I'm a lot more free and my mind's clear and I've got a connection with the guys around me," he said. "That's an important point, everyone was connected and on song and played their role to the best of their ability. But that wasn't the highlight of the game, as a team we should be proud because we won a very tough [game], we grinded it out. We saw that when we trusted our game plan we turned it into points."

Beale had to pass a pitchside concussion test to do most of his best work. In an interesting side note to the match, the playmaker was pulled from play some time after the collision in question. It emerged that Australian Rugby Union medical consultant Warren McDonald was able to review footage of the incident and make the retrospective call. Beale was cleared in the sheds and allowed to return to the field of play.