All Blacks going into Bledisloe Cup with head start on Wallabies

Seemingly the All Blacks will not get to play a warm-up Test before they take on the Wallabies in Bledisloe I.

Dave Rennie will get just two and a half weeks to prepare the Wallabies players.

Seemingly the All Blacks will not get to play a warm-up Test before they take on the Wallabies in Bledisloe I in either Sydney on Perth on October 10, or if they do, there will have to be some radical rescheduling done and in a hurry.

The New Zealand Herald announced on Saturday that the All Blacks’ first match of the year was expected to be announced this week against the Moana Pacific side on October 3 at Mt. Smart Stadium. That date momentarily sent shockwaves through Rugby Australia because by that stage the All Blacks should be about halfway through their two-week quarantine period in Australia ahead of the First Test.

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But RA has had plenty of experience themselves with arrangements being overtaken by the latest COVID-19 requirements and they quickly appreciated the match against the Pacific islands side might have to be bumped, in the same way that the North Island v South Island fixture has been put back to September 5.

There is no doubt the All Blacks will go into the Bledisloe series considerably more advanced in their preparation than Australia. Their Super Rugby Aotearoa competition, which started three weeks ahead of Super Rugby AU, was conducted without play-offs and ended a fortnight ago.

The Australian competition has a three-team finals system – an idea the New Zealanders intend to copy next year if they go it alone – but it means the two finalists will not be finished with their Super Rugby sides until the September 19 final. And as Wallabies coach Dave Rennie has noted, it wouldn’t be right to call players into camp on the Monday after a final.

“That probably leaves us about two and a half weeks,” Rennie told The Australian.

One could almost wring the frustration out of that sentence. Rennie was named as Wallabies coach on November 20 last year and since then has been quarantined in three different countries, killing time until he could be free to coach the Australian team. And now that he is, he will have only two and a half weeks. All Black coach Ian Foster will have two and a half months.

Even now, Rennie is uncertain where he will take the Wallabies into camp. The original plan had them going into Sanctuary Cove but that was in the expectation that the first Bledisloe might be played in Brisbane. Instead, Brisbane will not come into the picture until the second Test on October 17 – a date at Suncorp Stadium that Rugby Australia are clinging to with almost desperate enthusiasm. If the Test goes ahead on schedule, it will be the only fixture on the entire Australian rugby program that has remained unaltered for more than a year.

“If the Test is going to be in Perth we need to base ourselves there for a couple of weeks because of quarantine,” Rennie said. “It is still up in the air. It seems crazy. Our management group, which is made up of superbly organised people who would normally have this down pat 12 months ago … and now there is going to be a lot of running around at the last minute. But it is what it is and we have to be adaptable.”

Nor can the Australian team simply pick up where it left off with its last training session before the World Cup quarter-final in Oita last October. There are only seven members of the starting side against England still playing Super Rugby AU and seven reserves. While all of them are very much in contention for Test selection, the Wallabies set-up has been changed beyond recognition.

“We will do what we can do before the first Test and we are just trying to prioritise what we think is important going into the first game,” Rennie said. “We can’t nail everything because we just don’t have the time.”

He is, however, adamant Australia can field a side that will do the nation proud. “Oh absolutely. We have some good experienced hands and some good young kids coming through and the quality of the competition has got better, it’s got more intense and better continuity,” he said. “We are confident we can put a good side on the field. The key is around developing depth.”