On Saturday, inside the imposing Melbourne Cricket Ground, the Wallabies must win to keep the series alive or forever have their names etched into the history books as losers.
The Australians are not without hope. During the second half of the first Test, and last Tuesday against the First Nations and Pasifika, the Lions appeared to be a group at the end of a very long tour and an even longer season.
They are tiring. The six changes to their team for this match confirm that.
At the start of the tour, the Lions management were unhappy that there weren’t enough Wallabies players being made available to lift the standards in the provincial teams. Yet this week, the same Lions management objected to the selection of the former Bordeaux player Pete Samu for the First Nations and Pasifika.
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Samu has returned to Australia to play with the Waratahs next season. As the former Australian international did not play in the Super Rugby competition this season, he fell outside the guidelines of the pre-tour agreements.
Another way of looking at it would be that the Lions don’t want Samu match fit for the third Test. In Australia, this has been seen as the Lions acting with all the vestiges of imperialists touring their convict colony.
Andy Farrell's Lions fire the first shot in Australia
It was a classless act. The many Samu masks being worn in the crowd on Tuesday night tells you what the locals thought of the Lions’ decision.
Once again this week, there has not been a single interview with a Lions player on the nightly news of the host broadcaster for the series. This is despite the Lions having a touring party of over 90 people.
These cultural gaffes are merely adding to the long list of failures from the Lions. They have failed to grasp the importance of giving something back to the game of rugby in Australia.
The Lions management has been quick to drag out the fine print of the tour agreement to get Samu out of this week’s game. However, I can assure you that the next tour agreement will contain a clause insisting that Lions players are available to the local media on every day of the tour.
This week, Clive Woodward accurately described the Wallabies as playing with a losing mentality. Woodward understands that in test match rugby, winners physically dominate their opponent - something that the Wallabies failed to do. He understands that playing with physicality is a mindset.
In the opening 25 minutes of the first test, when the Lions grabbed control of the match, the Wallabies were passive, displaying a losing mentality.
The greatest example of the losing mindset was early in the match when Tom Curry illegally and dangerously tackled the Wallaby debutant outhalf Tom Lynagh while he was in the air.
The Wallaby forwards did nothing to Curry, who walked away smiling. He had been given a free ticket to put in a big illegal shot on a nervous young outhalf. While Curry should have been yellow carded, Lynagh’s teammates should have made it clear they weren’t happy.
Owen Farrell has been selected on the bench this week because he is made of far tougher stuff. On Tuesday night, when the First Nations and Pasifika players smashed Darcy Graham over the sideline, Farrell ran in and confronted the offending opposition players. His body language screamed “not on my watch”.
The First Nations and Pasifika team turned their aggression levels up into the red zone. They got in among the red team and bashed them up. It was a pleasure to watch and I hope the Wallabies watching in the stands took note.
While punching and foul play are now rightly outlawed, teams with players who are more influenced by St Francis of Assisi rather than Mike Tyson rarely come away with the chocolates.
In Brisbane, the lack of physical aggression from the Australians was the foundation of their defeat. What smashed the Australians on the scoreboard was that the Lions had completely cracked their opponents’ lineout calling code. As the ball left Wallaby hookers’ hands, the Lions knew its destination. Put that down to the Lions’ brilliant pre-game sleuthing in studying past games and listening to the audio of calls.
To gain such information in the old days, spies were sent to the opposition training sessions, some disguised as elderly dog walkers with concealed cameras in their handbags. Or there could be video cameras hidden on tripods in vacant corporate boxes at training fields. In modern times, drones have been known to zoom overhead.
A few nights before Scotland played Australia in the quarter-final of the 2003 Rugby World Cup, every piece of paper hanging on the walls of the Scottish team room mysteriously disappeared. They were full of tactical information and game-plan notes. Scotland lost to a Wallabies team who seemed to know a lot of Scottish calls.
Believe me, it’s a jungle out there.
The three foundational principles of rugby are fitness, skill and motivation. On Tuesday, we witnessed the First Nations and Pasifika bring forward their deep motivation in representing their people to almost overcome a Lions team with vastly superior skill and fitness levels.
That is Woodward’s point. The Wallabies acted like the cuddly marsupial on their emblem and did not unleash their inner dog to fight the Lions with every atom of their being for the full 80 minutes.
By the time the Australians started to play, the game was already lost.
To use an old-fashioned word, the Wallabies must use aggression to “bustle” the Lions. That means to throw the Lions off kilter, to upset the tempo and rhythm of their game plan.
The Wallabies must summon up the same ultra-aggressive spirit as the First Nations and Pasifika while also fixing their wobbly lineout. If they can, they have a chance.
With Will Skelton, Rob Valetini and Dave Porecki – the best lineout thrower in the squad – are all starting, making it a far better Wallaby selection than last week.
In selecting a 6-2 bench, head coach Joe Schmidt is telling us the Wallabies smell blood in the water and are going to attack the Lions scrum. That is something I did not predict at the beginning of the tour.
As we say in Australia, this is Sydney or the bush. This second test is all or nothing for the Wallabies.
With a giant injection of 80 minutes worth of old-fashioned aggression, the Australians are capable of an upset.
However, if they do not secure their own lineout possession, trouble awaits.
