THE Wallabies lost the battle against Ireland, but coach Michael Cheika believes they are winning the war against the perception that they are a soft touch.
The 26-23 loss to the Irish in Dublin was a heartbreaker for the team and its supporters, but Cheika was pleased with the grit shown by his much-maligned forwards.
“Most teams think they can out-muscle us,” he said.
“It’s up to us to harden right up and belie that image. The last few games we’ve really muscled up physically, there’s no doubt about that.
“I don’t know why that perception is there but it’s irrelevant what other teams think. What’s important is what we do. I was really happy with the tight five today. They’re getting better and we’re going to work harder with them and going to be really consistent in the physicality that’s required at the Test level.”
Overall the game was a huge improvement on the last two Tests against Wales and France, and offers hope for the future.
That future might not start as early as next week against England at Twickenham, but if the team can continue to improve, the prospects for next year’s Rugby World Cup are definitely on the up.
For the three weeks that Cheika has been in charge of the national side, he has preached a new approach: a game that would combine physicality with enterprise; confidence with anger.
At times in the disappointing loss to Ireland, the Wallabies showed that they not only understood what Cheika has been talking about, but that they could actually put it into practise.
The second try scored by Nick Phipps after a 90-metre attack peppered with deft passes, power running and daring sleight-of-hand, was the best the team has scored on the current Spring Tour, and the equal of anything any Wallaby side has ever achieved.
It might not have been enough to win the match, but it was evidence of what Australian rugby supporters can look forward to if Cheika can just add that other ingredient he has been mentioning at every opportunity: consistency.
“We had some really good bits of attacking play,” he said.
“We’re trying to set up a shape and style that we want to play, with small variations that we can play out of that.
“Those are the ones that we can get the opposition to make a mistake out of, and we did that tonight. When we ran at them we committed many more defenders and defensive ruck people to the contest, which opened a bit of space out wide and our running backs were able to get good yardage.
“We still need to refine what we do after we get those yards. We probably lacked that clinical edge at the end.”
It was the same lament that was heard after last week’s 29-26 loss to France, but this was a very different scenario.
Against France, Australia bumbled its way through 78 appalling error-riddled minutes and somehow managed to still be in with a chance of winning at the end. Against Ireland, they fought back from a 17-nil deficit with some scintillating play and were beaten in the end by a ruck penalty that could have gone either way.
“I’m very disappointed not to get the result,” Cheika said.
“It was different to last week where we got close but would have been lucky to win. This week we got close and were probably unlucky not to win.
“We showed a lot of resilience and toughness to come back. Away from home it would have been easy to say, ‘Ok we’ve got one week to go, let’s pack up’ but we came back and we came back really well.
“I’m just very, very sad about losing. We’ll mourn the loss because it was a difficult loss, but we’ll bounce back and be ready for a good prep week and try to do our best at Twickenham”.
IRELAND 26 (Tommy Bowe, Simon Zebo tries Jonathan Sexton 2 cons 4 pens) bt AUSTRALIA 23 (Nick Phipps 2, Bernard Foley tries Foley con 2 pens) at Aviva Stadium.
