RWC 2015: Wales left licking wounds but Wallaby confidence rises

The drive from Weybridge to Teddington is not a long one – it takes less than half an hour if the M3 behaves itself – but the respective World Cup residents suddenly find themselves a universe apart.

Wales, licking their wounds in Surrey, were in full body-count mode yesterday, hoping they would find enough fit players to take on the Springboks on Saturday.

The only concern for Australia, enjoying some well-earned R&R in neighbouring Middlesex, was the danger of counting their chickens.

Liam Williams, the versatile back-three operator who means so much to Wales – especially in the absence of Leigh Halfpenny and Hallam Amos – is definitely out of the remainder of the competition, having suffered a foot injury during the eye-wateringly physical meeting with the Wallabies at Twickenham on Saturday evening. The Scarlets player was injured during his country’s tournament warm-up, took a nasty smack on the head during the victory over England and is now crocked again. It’s a hard old game, for sure.

It leaves Warren Gatland, the head coach, in the barest of bare-bones situations. He has lost all three of his premier full-backs, together with his two best outside centres and his first-choice scrum-half, although the hot form of Gareth Davies in the latter position – underlined during the 15-6 defeat by the Wallabies – has made life a little easier to bear in the No 9 department. Only five days and counting before the quarter-final confrontation with opponents as formidable as South Africa, the scale of the challenge is as daunting as it gets.

Not that the Australians are in absolutely pristine shape. Two of their stellar talents, the full-back Israel Folau and the back-row forward David Pocock, finished the Wales game in significant discomfort and it will be profoundly surprising if their front-rowers, all of whom worked themselves to a standstill in repulsing the long second-half siege that lay at the heart of the contest, are wholly free of the effects come the last eight tie with Scotland in six days’ time.

But the Wallaby psychology could hardly be in ruder health, not that they are screaming about it from the hilltops. Indeed, their strategy for this tournament is based, at least in part, on a deep reluctance to shout the odds. “We’ve lost to the Scots a couple of times in recent years, maybe because we thought it would be easy,” said their super-smart coach, Michael Cheika. “We won’t be thinking that this week. There is no favourable side of the draw. The only favour is that you’re still there, still in it.”

Yeah, yeah. Cheika has been pretty damned good at pretty much everything so far, but the “ever so humble” thing does not quite fit. He lifted a veil on his real thinking when asked whether the Wallabies’ momentous manning of the barricades against Wales would work wonders for their self-belief. “You don’t build belief by going through something like that,” he replied, tellingly. “You need belief to go through it.”

There could have been no clearer illustration of Australia’s sense of themselves: they think, with very good reason, that they can do this thing. By beating a pumped-up Wales in the way they did – down to the 13 men when the lock Dean Mumm joined the scrum-half Will Genia in the cooler, there was nothing left for them but to win on their arses, as the current jargon has it – they sent out quite a signal.

As their victory over England seven days previously had been an attacking production rather than a defensive one, it is tempting to suggest they have more scope than any other side in the draw.

They are certainly blessed in the back-row department. Having lost Michael Hooper to suspension, they picked the age-group captain Sean McMahon as a like-for-like breakaway ahead of Ben McCalman – a more gnarled and knotty sort entirely.

It was not a roaring success, hence McCalman’s early introduction off the bench, but everything came right in the end when the one Western Force player in the squad prevented George North from scoring what would have been a game-changing try on the hour. In fact, he stopped him twice in the space of three seconds.

Throw in Adam Ashley-Cooper’s siege-lifting tackle on Dan Biggar a minute or so later – a triumph of rugby instinct and understanding, of decisiveness and execution – and there is good reason to believe these Wallabies are almost as bloody-minded as John Eales’ vintage circa 1999, who left these islands with the Webb Ellis Cup in the hold of the plane.

open image in gallery

Hooper will be available for the quarter-final and seems certain to play. The conundrum facing Cheika surrounds a handful of other key individuals who, after two games of such magnitude, could use a rest: the loose-head prop Scott Sio, the lock Kane Douglas, the outside-half Bernard Foley, the centres Matt Giteau and Tevita Kuridrani.

The coach has options, especially in a batch of back-line reserves including players as good as Quade Cooper, Matt Toomua and Henry Speight. Will he stick, or will he twist?

Gatland does not have such a choice: basically, he’s just stuck. But on the evidence of last weekend, Wales have a better chance of taking the Springboks to the wire than Scotland have of dumping the Wallabies out of a tournament growing numbers of people think they can win.