Joe Schmidt has responded to Rassie Erasmus’ claim that the Wallabies are playing like the 2019 Springboks.
Erasmus said as much after naming his team for the second Test match between the two sides in Cape Town.
According to the Boks boss, the Wallabies focus on being strong defensively, punishing the opposition’s errors while also leaning into a strong kicking game.
Wallabies playing like 2019 Springboks
While South Africa does still make use of some of these tactics, they have embraced a more expansive game. Erasmus believes that the tactics deployed in 2019 won’t win the Rugby World Cup in 2027.
“I feel Australia are playing pretty much like we did in 2019, defend, defend, and if you make an error, they will pounce on that,” he said.
“We don’t believe that’s the way to win the next World Cup. We will never throw everything out; we’ve worked too hard over the last two or three years to get things in place.”
Asked for his reaction to Erasmus’ comments, Schmidt felt that the Wallabies did enjoy some success with ball in hand during the Test at Ellis Park.
However, he did admit that the Wallabies benefited from the Springboks’ errors as they overturned a 22-point deficit to claim a fantastic 38-22 victory.
“I don’t really get distracted too much by comments. Look, South Africa will commit to the way they play, and we’ll commit to the way we’re trying to play,” Schmidt said.
“It doesn’t always work the way we’d like it to. I felt that there were times that we engineered our own line breaks and some pretty positive plays.
“We didn’t have long periods of defence, we tended to concede ground pretty quickly, especially in that first 20 minutes and would have liked the defence to go on a bit longer. But they had already got over the line and scored. That didn’t work too well.
“And then we did profit from a few errors from the South Africans, and we’re a little bit lucky that those errors occurred, and I’m sure that’s something that Rassie will have solved in the week.”
Building cohesion
Schmidt does hope that the stunning comeback in Johannesburg will build some confidence in the squad going forward.
That’s why he has also persisted with several combinations in his starting XV where possible, with Len Ikitau and Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii combining in the midfield once again, while Nic White and James O’Connor are the starting half-backs. Will Skelton and Nick Frost combine in the second-row.
“You hope that it does build belief,” he added.
“You hope that it gives confidence to players so they don’t hesitate, they seize the moment in front of them and play as best they can. That would certainly be what we’re hoping for.
“We are trying to build some more cohesion. We try to keep some combinations together so that cohesion can continue to build because we had a camp for two days in January, and then didn’t really assemble the team until the lead into the Fiji Test that we had.