Wallabies players have revealed the brutal statistic and pre-game bonding session that helped them banish the ghosts of San Juan and secure a resounding win against South Africa in Adelaide.
As Australia plot back-to-back wins against the Springboks in Sydney on Saturday, centre Len Ikitau and fullback Reece Hodge opened up on the tweaks the group made to their preparations leading into the Adelaide match.
Starting with the cold, hard facts of the team’s woeful starts this season, finishing with a group stretching and visualisation session on game day and bolstered by the presence of new assistant coach Laurie Fisher, the Wallabies orchestrated an emphatic 25-17 win over the reigning world champions.
It is a feat they are desperate to repeat at the new Allianz Stadium on Saturday, next door to the ground on which the late Wallabies captain, Jim Lenehan, scored a match-winning try against the Springboks in 1965.
Lenehan died last week, aged 64, the Wallabies marking his life with black armbands in Adelaide. Coach Dave Rennie on Monday invoked his spirit in the lead-up to what promises to be a sold-out return clash in Sydney.
Lenehan scored the opening try in that Test at the SCG in front of almost 46,000 people. It was an Australian record attendance for a Test match at the time and kicked off what descended into a winless five-Test tour for the Springboks across Australia and New Zealand. The Wallabies won again in Brisbane in a back-to-back feat Rennie’s side are trying to emulate.
“They showed us stats on how we’d been beaten in the first 20 minutes of every game this year.”
Wallabies fullback Reece Hodge
The man who is set to wear the No.15 jersey again, almost six decades after Lenehan’s triumph, said it was a series of small tweaks, combined with the embarrassment of a record loss in Argentina, that laid a platform for Saturday’s win.
“Probably a big element was the fact we had a pretty tough review on Monday,” Hodge said. “After a poor performance we put in Argentina, you always expect a response and I think that was the main driving factor.
“They showed us stats on how we’d been beaten in the first 20 minutes of every game this year, so I think it’s a combination of all those things. It was pleasing to start well on the weekend but it doesn’t mean anything if we don’t do it again this weekend.”
The Wallabies also overhauled their pre-game ritual, making sure every player was in the team room 45 minutes before leaving for the ground, to take part in a stretching session while South African plays were streamed on loop in the background.
“It was just connecting as a group, getting some stretches down, watching some footage of some possible plays that were coming, and getting our mind right,” Ikitau said.
“It was a bit on and off (before that), everyone wouldn’t be in stretching, everyone was doing other things, so it was about connecting as a group right before we left. I thought it really helped for us in starting fast and being switched on.”
Ikitau and Hodge both know what it takes to secure consecutive wins, both of them playing in the same Test last year, when the Wallabies bettered a 28-26 win in the first Test with a 30-17 win in the second. Ikitau scored two tries in the opening stages of that game, again proving that starting well was key to finishing on top.
Rennie is unlikely to change a winning formula and won’t be forced to through injury, the first time this year he has had that luxury.
The team were back at their Gold Coast base for training on Monday morning, shrugging off South African hysteria around Nic White’s football-style dive in reaction to a slap to the face from counterpart Faf de Klerk.
The group took a moment after the session to talk through the week’s plans. The squad sat on the grass fields at Sanctuary Cove and emphasised the impact on a game of each player’s preparation early in the week.
“A lot of it is mindset … we’ve addressed it as players, the fact that we want to back it up and don’t want to wait for the coaches to put a rocket up us, or to have a poor performance that has to force us into something,” Hodge said.
“That’s on individuals more so than the team, just so that the detail is there, the mindset is there, and we can go out and execute and the skills can be at a high level from the outset, rather than waiting for what the opposition brings and reacting to it. Hopefully we can stop talking about it and do it this weekend.”
Watch every match of The Rugby Championship on the Home of Rugby, Stan Sport. Continues this weekend with All Blacks v Argentina (Saturday 4pm AEST) and Wallabies v South Africa (Saturday 7pm AEST). All matches streaming ad-free, live and on demand on Stan Sport.