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If only Henry Slade had managed to stop Ben Donaldson getting that off-load away, if only Ollie Sleightholme had been able to make that wrap-up tackle on Len Ikitau, if only Marcus Smith was able to catch Max Jorgensen. But Slade didn’t, Sleightholme couldn’t, Smith wasn’t, and Jorgensen scored in the corner. This time last year the Wallabies beat England 42-37, their first victory against them at Twickenham in nine years, and it was, the players will tell you themselves, the moment when everything changed. “This game last year was a big turning point for us as a group,” says the Australia captain, Harry Wilson, “it really made us believe that on our day we can beat anybody in the world.”
Twelve months ago England weren’t worried about the Wallabies so much as they were worried for the Wallabies. The one thing an Australian team doesn’t want is pity, but that’s what they got. They had won two Tests out of 11 in 2023, when they embarrassed themselves at the World Cup, and, after a few months during which he seemed to spend most of his time bowling around in a cork hat and shouting at everyone about how rubbish Australian rugby was, their head coach Eddie Jones had defected to Japan. A couple of their better players had hopped codes to play in the NRL and they had dropped to ninth in the world rankings. It was all getting a bit existential.
It’s one of the great truths of English sport that you should never give an Aussie side an even break. A week after Jorgensen scored to beat England they put 50 points past Wales, and two weeks after that came within three of beating Ireland. They took one Test off the British & Irish Lions, and were one more score away from making it two, then they beat the Springboks at Ellis Park in the opening round of this year’s Rugby Championship. “Before that win James Slipper was the only one of us who had won at Twickenham,” says Fraser McReight, “So it meant a lot for this group, and when you look at what’s happened since, the way it sort of slingshot us into the matches against the Lions and South Africa, it’s been massive.”
All of a sudden, the Kanagaroos are one-nil up in one Ashes series, “should wrap that up this weekend,” says Wilson; the English cricket team are, he insists, “going to find it hard to get a win” during the other Ashes series, and the Wallabies, well, they’re pretty confident too, even if they are missing a handful of their best players because Australia were unable to negotiate their release from their English clubs to play this weekend because the Test falls outside the international match window. How confident are they? “Very confident,” says their English-born winger Harry Potter.
“We’ve got 35 players here on tour who are ready to do the job, and we’ve got 23 people this weekend to go out and do the job,” says Wilson. “We’ve been building really strong depth this year. It’s been one of our biggest areas of improvement. So even when we’re are missing a few big players we’re at a point where we believe in everyone who has been selected. It was the same situation last year, and we did the job then too.” Ten of the XV playing this weekend started last year’s game too.
Head coach Joe Schmidt says the difference between this Wallabies team and that one is in the way they play. A lot of his work over the last 18 months has been in building up the team’s sense of team identity, and how it shows up in their fast, free-running style of play. “I think that’s part of the Australian rugby DNA. They like to use the ball. Now, we know that defences can be very dense, so there are times when you’ve got to be able to be a bit more strategic. But it’s not very often that the Wallabies have made more line breaks than the All Blacks in the Rugby Championship, for example, and while we didn’t get the results we were looking for against them, I still felt that we used the ball pretty well.”
Same goes in the Lions series. “We scored some outstanding tries and we’ll be looking to do something similar now,” says Wilson. “I feel like we’ve got that respect back and I know our fans are enjoying the footy we are playing.”
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It will be Schmidt’s last series with the team, and, he says, his last Test at Twickenham. He has a lot of happy memories of the place. He won the Heineken Cup there with Leinster in 2012, and the grand slam with Ireland in 2018. “Yeah, I’m a little bit relieved, and a little bit sad,” Schmidt says. “I don’t know how many Test matches I’ve been involved in, but I know how special they are. As a kid growing up in a small town, you don’t ever expect it. You watch these games on black and white TV, that’s how old I am, and I think about how special it is. It’s been a massive privilege. There’ll be moments probably I won’t miss, where things haven’t gone according to plan, but there have been moments I will miss, for sure.” His team are hoping to give him one more yet.
