Pressure on Sean McMahon as Wallabies face must-win Test

Having made history for much of last year, the Wallabies want to avoid making history by losing a series to England.

Wallabies coach Michael Cheika gathers his players to issue instructions during yesterday’s captain run at AAMI Park.

Having made history for much of last year, the Wallabies desperately want to avoid making history tonight, and the player it all revolves around is the youngest of them all, Sean McMahon.

It was only on Thursday that McMahon celebrated his 22nd birthday, making him exactly 15 months younger than England’s child prodigy, five-eighth George Ford, but fate has conspired to put him literally at the crossroads of rugby history. Australia has never lost a rugby series to England, but they will lose one tonight if Eddie Jones’s side prevails in the second Test at AAMI Park.

Not only is he replacing the Wallabies’ talisman, David Pocock, not only will he be playing his first Test on home soil, but he also will be taking over a position he has never played before in professional rugby, No 8. Yet, despite his youth and inexperience, there would be no player more welcome in the Australian ranks because there is none more fearless. Or more authentic.

“If I had to say one thing about him, it’s that he’s genuine,” Wallabies coach Michael Cheika said yesterday. “If he says he is going to do something on the field — or off it — he does it.”

Dual international Michael O’Connor insists there is no one who puts words into action quite like the Rebels backrower.

“Sean is the type of person you’d want in the trenches beside you,” said O’Connor. It’s a tad ironic that O’Connor would phrase it in that way because he was the person who literally saved McMahon from a life in the military.

Having missed out on a career in rugby league, McMahon had resigned himself to joining the army. All the forms had been filled in, his mum was, as he puts it, “wigging out a little” over the prospect of him being posted to Afghanistan or Iraq, when his brother Brett convinced him to play in the 2011 Noosa Sevens tournament. It was there he was spotted for the first time by O’Connor, then the Australian sevens coach.

“What I saw was a 17-year-old kid, absolutely fearless, who had an incredible work ethic,” O’Connor recalled yesterday. “I met him afterwards, saw he was a great stamp of a young man, met his ­parents, Paddy and Shauna, did some research into his rugby league and then signed him for two years. He always wanted to get into the Wallabies but he was sorely missed when he left the sevens program.”

Friend and foe soon realised that when McMahon wanted the ball, which he did all the time, it was safer just to let him have it. And while Jones’s men will surely engage him in battle, the Wallabies No 8 is impressed not at all by those who suggest that, at 100kg, he is too light for the fight. The man he will mark, Billy Vunipola, will outweigh him by fully 26kg.

“Everyone’s talking about my weight as an issue but I take the attitude that the bigger they are, the harder they fall,” said McMahon, to resounding cheers when he spoke at the Weary Dunlop lunch yesterday. There are, however, pragmatic issues that a first-time No 8 like McMahon will have to contend with, like clearing the ball from the base of a scrum that could be going backwards. And these scrums could turn particularly tricky if the notorious AAMI Park surface starts to get ploughed up by the two rival packs.

Despite public statements that the pitch will be OK, ARU and Victorian rugby officials admit to being nervous about how it will hold up. Repair crews will be on hand with tools to flatten out the pitch but their worst fear is that South African referee Craig Joubert will deem the surface unfit for scrums. “It’s his call,” The Weekend Australian was told when asked if the Tests would be played with uncontested scrums.

Australia have always come from behind in Melbourne in the second episode of a three-Test ­series. They did it in the 2001 Lions series, and did it again in the 2013 Lions series. But they cannot rely on history, any more than they can rely on coming out on the right side of a Joubert penalty count.

“At one stage (in Brisbane), we’d scored four tries to two and yet we were four points down,” said Cheika. “That’s your fault. You can’t be giving your opponent the opportunity to kick six goals. You’re not going to stay in the contest.”