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The Wallabies are banking on a bomb squad-style bench to fix the second-half fadeouts that proved fatal on the Spring Tour last year, and power Australia home to victory over Ireland in Sydney on Saturday.
After some impressive form in the first half of the Test season, the Wallabies went off the rails in a big way last year, ending with a winless four-game tour of Europe.
Ireland provided one of those defeats with a 46-19 win in Dublin, but the game followed a similar script to most of the games on the Spring Tour.
The Wallabies were in the contest at half-time, trailing 19-14, but then conceded 27 points in the last 25 minutes.
The same thing happened against England, when a half-time score of 10-7 ended up as a 25-7 loss, and a 12-9 half-time lead over Italy became a 26-19 loss. The Wallabies and France were locked at 19-all at the break, but Australia ultimately went down 48-33.
Even in beating Japan on the way to Europe, the Wallabies were outscored 12-5 in the second half.
In each game, most of the damage was even more narrowly incurred, in the final 20 minutes. Of 160 points conceded on the five-game tour, 69 of them came in the last quarter of matches – a disproportionate 43%.
Defence wasn’t the only issue, however: the Wallabies’ attack also went missing after oranges.
Australia averaged 13.2 points in the first halves, but only managed 6.2 points per game after the break. Combined with the huge spike in average points conceded – from 12 points in first 40 minutes to 20 in the second half – it all spelt disaster for the Wallabies.
“We’re 19-14 at half-time and we’ve had far less of the ball, far less of the territory, but we’re still in the game,” Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt said of the Ireland clash in November.
“Then in the last four minutes, they score those two late tries when we over-chase the game. But before that, it’s 32-19 and we actually had a couple of field positions that if we maximise what we can get out of them, you become a chance when you’re only 13 points off.
“You get a score and you’re close enough. So we don’t feel like we’re miles away.”
The perplexing part to the Wallabies’ Spring Tour fadeouts is they had the exact opposite problem earlier in the year, when they routinely started slowly and finished strongly.
In the Lions series, and in two-Test swings against the Springboks and Argentina, the Wallabies – on average – trailed 16-9 in first halves but then won the second halves 16-8.
But on the Spring Tour the famine-feast equation flipped.
“We definitely learned from a few of those moments over there,” Wallabies captain Harry Wilson said on Friday.
“In all those games we were sort of in there with 20 minutes to go, but we didn’t finish the games as well as we did, which we probably did really well at the start of the year, when our bench came on and made massive impacts. They were the difference in a few of the earlier wins.
“We’ve got a really strong bench this week. Players like Tom Hooper, Tom Wright, James Slipper, Taniela Tupou on the bench.
“They’re going to come and make a big impact. Hopefully if the game’s in position for them to make a big impact at the end.”
Crucially, the Wallabies bench also contains veteran halfback Tate McDermott, a key second-half attacking weapon who missed the Spring Tour due to a nasty hamstring injury.
All up, the Wallabies’ bench has four players with more than 40 Test caps, while Brandon Paenga-Amosa (25) debuted in 2018 and Hooper (22) is in career-best form. The average number of Test caps on the Wallabies bench is 47, and though that figure is heavily slanted by James Slipper’s 151, it also contains Lachlan Shaw’s zero caps.
The Aussie bench has the edge, experience-wise, on Ireland (32 caps average) but the visitors are well ahead in the starting side, with an average of 42 caps per man. Australia have just an average of 28.5, and that’s the gamble Schmidt has seemingly taken; backing his starters to keep the Wallabies in the contest until the last half-hour rolls around.
“We feel like we’ve got a good plan and now it’s on us to go there and execute against them,” Wilson said.
“I guess we’ve been versing them in their backyard and now they’re coming to ours. In those games, we saw a few opportunities where if we grabbed them there, the game could have went one or two ways.
“We’ve definitely looked at that and we know in those big moments we need to step up and grab it.”
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