Wallaby coach to stick with winning team for road less travelled

Wallaby coach Joe Schmidt is expected to stick as close to the team that beat the British and Irish Lions in Sydney last weekend as he can when he announces his touring squad on Wednesday.

And while he announced his retirement from international rugby during the course of the iconic series against the British and Irish composite team, it appears there is a good chance that the architect of the win in the Sydney wet, scrumhalf Nic White, will be in the group travelling to South Africa.

“We will announce an updated squad on Wednesday,” said Schmidt after his team’s 22-12 win that enabled the Wallabies to avoid the ignominy of being the first nation since 1927 to be whitewashed by the Lions.

“It won’t be massively different as people earn the jersey and there are people who did that (in Sydney).”

With another scrumhalf in Jake Gordon being doubtful to tour due to a hamstring injury, Schmidt is pressured when it comes to halfbacks and that is why it is quite possible that White’s retirement will only last a few days and he will be back for the games in Johannesburg and Cape Town on 16 and 23 August respectively.

“Whitey will rival me, maybe in terms of being like Johnny Farnham (singer) in the sense that there’s one more tour,” said Schmidt when asked about the possibility of White being talked out of his retirement. Schmidt is in his last few months as Wallabies coach as he will hand over to Les Kiss after the Castle Lager Rugby Championship.

The player himself appears open to the possibility of playing on: “If duty calls, I absolutely love wearing the jersey,” he was quoted as saying in the Australian media.

CAN EXPECT HOT RECEPTION

If he does come he can expect a hot reception from South African crowds for the way he infamously milked a penalty and a yellow card for Faf de Klerk in a game in Brisbane a few years ago.

If White is included his presence will make a difference to the Wallabies as he is an experienced player and a shrewd tactician. However, the conditions the Australians are likely to encounter in South Africa, at least in the first game in Johannesburg, should be very different to the monsoon-like weather and drenched field that played to his strengths in Sydney.

And while the Wallabies have been treated as if they were series winners by their public since what was effectively a dead rubber win, and why not as it did break a sequence of losses, many of the players will be stepping into what has now become a relative unknown for them due to South Africa no longer being part of Super Rugby - a trip to the highveld.

The Wallabies have a horrendous record at altitude, and while they did win in Bloemfontein in 2010 with a last-gasp, long-range Kurtley Beale kick and drew there in the Allister Coetzee era as Bok coach, their record at the Gauteng venues has been horrible. The task this time will also be made stiffer because the Aussies have been rare visitors to South Africa in the last few years, with most of the matches between the two nations since 2019 having been played in Australia.

WALLABIES HAVE BECOME INFREQUENT VISITORS

The Wallabies have in fact come to South Africa only once since the end of the Super Rugby era (for SA), which was in 2023 when Eddie Jones’ men were smashed 43-12 at Loftus by a Bok squad that was severely understrength. That was the game where Jones’ frustration was shown at the post-match press conference when he lashed out at a journalist for what he considered “a cheap shot” question.

The game before that was in the buildup to the 2019 World Cup, with another experimental Bok team prevailing with some comfort, this time 35-17. That will be remembered as the day that scrumhalf Herschelle Jantjies announced himself as a contender for the World Cup squad by scoring a brace of tries on his Bok debut.

Those two games won’t be good for the confidence of those Australian players who have survived since then and will be back for this trip and the fact the Wallabies have only played two games in South Africa in the past six years, both of them big losses at altitude, could prove to be a massive mental barrier for Schmidt’s team to overcome.

The Aussie players no longer have the familiarity with stadiums like Emirates Airlines Park that they once had when they were regular visitors to this country with their Super Rugby sides and their lack of familiarity with the theatre they are about to step into could count heavily against them regardless of who is on the flight to South Africa.