Hard grind and focus the keys to breaking New Zealand stranglehold

If Australian teams are to beat their New Zealand counterparts, they will need to embrace the hard grind.

Waratahs five-eighth Bernard Foley. Picture: Getty Images

New Zealand Super Rugby sides tend to be flash and showy, particularly against their trans-­Tasman ­rivals, but if Australian teams are to beat them, they will need to embrace the hard grind, Waratahs and Wallabies five-eighth Bernard Foley warned yesterday.

With one exception since the beginning of the April, Australian teams have lost every Super Rugby match they have played against foreign teams. The only deviation from the trend was Queensland’s stunning victory over the Lions of South Africa on April 28. Otherwise, foreign teams have won eight straight, with NZ sides winning four of them.

By now — as everyone knows, most especially the Australian players — Kiwi sides have stretched their domination to 38 consecutive wins over Australian opponents and there is, potentially, more pain on the way on Saturday when the Waratahs take on the reigning Super Rugby champions, the Crusaders, in Christchurch.

On Saturday at Brookvale Oval, NSW lost the one trans-­Tasman contest that most experts believed an Australian side could win, against the bottom-placed Kiwi side, the Blues. What made the 24-21 defeat even harder to swallow for the Tahs is that they too believed a win was there for the taking.

“In my opinion, I thought we were the better team,” Foley said. “But we just couldn’t convert. The team has to learn to convert and win those games.”

Foley claimed that in a number of areas, like workrate, the Waratahs matched their NZ rivals. “What we have to do is the technical stuff, being able to convert pressure and possession and turn it into points, and that’s something that in the last couple of games, we’ve really let ourselves down.

“It’s just hard work, instilling that belief in training, knowing guys are doing the work and then it will all happen. It’s about doing what you know rather than trying to do it on your own. Sticking tight and backing the guys around you. It’s about enjoying the grind, enjoying it, not feeling that pressure.”

Foley’s belief that the turnaround rested with the Australian sides, irrespective of how good their NZ opponents might be, found an echo in Melbourne where Rebels lock, former British and Irish Lion Geoff Parling, insisted after his side’s 55-10 loss to the Crusaders that focusing on the enemy was counter-productive.

“They’re a good team but I don’t think we should be talking about how good they are,” Parling said. “The reason we lost has a lot to do with what we did. We were in the game but we made some mistakes, we made some errors. When you give a team like that (chances) they’re going to run away with it and take their opportunities and that’s what they did. But I don’t think we should ‘big’ them up. They’re a good team but we were at fault.”

Rebels coach Dave Wessels ­totally endorsed that mindset.

“We’re playing a very good team and you’re not going to beat that team unless you execute the details that you’ve spoken about in the week beforehand and with ­intensity,” Wessels told The ­Australian. “I can think of three tries that they scored where we missed some detail. That’s 21 points straight away. Geoff is exactly right. We were in the game until we made those mistakes and we need probably a lot more mental toughness, both in our preparation and in our execution.”

Wessels acknowledged that when NZ teams built up momentum, Australian teams weren’t handling it at all.