alloped by the world champions in one Test and beaten by their B-team in the other, Australia turn for the second leg of the Rugby Championship with plenty to puzzle on. First and foremost is how to score tries. In 160 minutes against the Springboks, the Wallabies scored one – a 75th-minute consolation try against 13 men in Brisbane that consoled no one.
Yes, they were up against South Africa, for 43 weeks the planet’s No 1 rugby side and back-to-back World Cup winners, a team with three times the experience and twice the confidence. But Rassie Erasmus’s side were also world champions when Australia defeated them three times in succession between September 2021 and August 2022.
This series’ nine-tries-to-one and 63-19 points aggregate reflects the chasm in quality between the side, yet still doesn’t capture just how far off the pace the Wallabies are. If not for sloppy Springboks handling and desperate red-zone defence from Australia’s back three, South Africa might easily have piled on 100+ points across the two matches.
In comparison, Australia rarely looked like crossing the stripe in either contest. On the ground and in the air, through the middle or out wide, they bashed into contact and bounced off time and again. The men in gold did make gains in Perth but Erasmus’s second-string XV rose-tinted the optics. The Wallabies were thoroughly outgunned.
Joe Schmidt’s battered squad now face an arduous road trip to Argentina for two Tests against a Los Pumas side who only last week out-manoeuvred the All Blacks. They have two weeks to lick their wounds and panel-beat injured personnel – 12 short days to find some attacking weapons and devise a gameplan that gets them scoring tries.
If the Wallabies improve as much as they did between Brisbane and Perth, they are a chance. At Suncorp Stadium, the Wallabies kicked away too much possession and, in the rare moments they had it (and managed to keep it), were too bunched to break through with power. In Perth, despite the deluge, they upped the ante and went wide by hand and by boot.
The chief orchestrator of this innovation was flyhalf Noah Lolesio, whose name seems to predispose him to performing best when floods hit from the west. The best game of Lolesio’s enigmatic 22-Test career was his blinder in bucketing Perth rain that calmly steered a 13-man Australia home 30-28 against Eddie Jones’s England in 2022.
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