Joe Schmidt: What will ‘concern’ Rassie Erasmus ahead of All Blacks clash
Wallabies head coach Joe Schmidt and an inset of Springboks boss Rassie Erasmus
Wallabies boss Joe Schmidt has pinpointed one statistic that will concern Springboks head coach Rassie Erasmus going forward in the Rugby Championship.
Australia left South Africa with five tournament points that they collected at Ellis Park, but they came up empty-handed in Cape Town on Saturday.
Wallabies injuries
The Wallabies fought valiantly in the Mother City, particularly with the side contending with several injuries in their backline, with Nic White, Tom Wright and Joseph Sua’ali’i failing to play beyond half- time.
That ultimately led to the visitors being ‘disjointed’ in the view of their head coach, who was still proud of the manner in which they fought back into the game and into a position to potentially win the game, but James O’Connor was not accurate enough from the tee.
The injury to White was a particularly big blow in Schmidt’s view.
“He reads the game so well. He’ll be a great coach; he certainly runs the game really well for us,” he said.
“Losing both him and Tom Wright, who was outstanding last week, obviously, caused a little bit of a reshuffle. That early, it does destabilise you a little bit.
“The Springboks then got off to a good lead in that first half but I thought we were really competitive and in the second half, which we won, not by enough to get quite back in the game but at 23-22 down and a conversion to come, I really felt that the players had done a fantastic job to roll their sleeves up and get back into that game.”
Springboks’ concern
When pressed on whether the Springboks were overwhelmingly better this week, Schmidt said it was difficult to compare two Test matches but was resolute in his statement that the first 20 minutes in Johannesburg were the best he’d seen the South Africans in some time.
“I don’t think I’ve seen the Boks play as well as they did in the first 20 minutes last week. Geez, we couldn’t breathe. They were on us,” he said.
“They got the first four kicks back; they didn’t quite have the same success today. So I thought that was the best window I’ve seen the Boks play for some time.
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“But they know how to wear you down, and they were very physical today, it’s hard to compare week to week, but again I felt we finished quite strongly and created a nice overlap at the end when Fassi got the penalty against him but yeah, it was hard work to be able to create those spaces today, so I think they suffocated us a little bit better.”
He added: “On the other side, I don’t think our cohesion was as good with losing all those players, particularly early on.
“It’s hard to say, I felt we were disjointed today so we didn’t quite get the fluency that we were looking for with the changes that we had during the game.”
Despite the Springboks’ victory this week, Schmidt pinpointed an area of concern, which was the six linebreaks that the Wallabies made in the match.
“I think Rassie will be concerned that there were still, I think, half a dozen line breaks, and he’ll be looking back at that, and that’s always something you do as a coach,” he said.
“It’s always hard to compare what happened today with what the All Blacks are going to do in Eden Park, but the All Blacks are a free-flowing side. Having said that, they scrummed and mauled to kind of beat Argentina into submission last week.”
