The Waratahs say losing to the Sunwolves won’t force changes to their Wallabies rotation plan, meaning skipper Michael Hooper is a strong chance to miss Saturday’s clash with the in-form Blues.
NSW crashed to earth last Friday when a mistake-riddled performance saw them downed by the Sunwolves by two points in Newcastle.
Under the agreement with Michael Cheika to manage workloads of international players, the game represented the first time the Waratahs had rested a tranche of their large Wallaby continent: Bernard Foley, Adam Ashley-Cooper and Jack Dempsey.
A costly conference defeat followed but NSW assistant coach Simon Cron echoed on Sunday the post-match sentiments of head coach Daryl Gibson by saying the loss hasn’t diminished their support for the workload plan, nor their pre-season outline on when they’ll rest players.
Hooper, and other “high minutes” Test players like Israel Folau, Sekope Kepu, Ned Hanigan and Rob Simmons, have to start ticking off their two-game absences and it’s believed the captain has been pencilled in to sit out this weekend.
Though there is flexibility to account for injury, the Tahs are confident back-up flanker Will Miller will be returning from injury this week and be able to step in.
The Tahs have a bye after the Blues and then play the Rebels. A two-game tour to South Africa follows that.
It’s a team-by-team strategy play about whether players stay home from Africa altogether, or play one of the games, like the Rebels did.
Even if NSW wanted to hit the panic button post-Sunwolves and play all their stars against the in-form Blues, that would only leave them more exposed to trouble later in the year when crunch games arrive and those rotation boxes haven’t yet been ticked.
“I don’t think the result changes it,” Cron said.
“Really it is about what’s good for the player and the squad, and obviously the Wallabies. We will sit down on Monday and we have a rough idea of when and who. But at the same time, we are always evaluating it, depending on injury and what happens to the squad make-up.
“Like for example, Will Miller and that sort of thing. I think that will be a discussion point on Monday … we’ll talk about the next 2-3 weeks and what we think and where. Post that we have a trip to Africa as well and we’ll have to look forward to that time.
“What we have to be wary of getting to the end of the season and having to rest everybody. It is not a massive (problem) when you look at the number of games and the number of players who are going to have to at some stage rotate, you are probably going to look to have one or two out every couple of weeks in different conditions.
At the start of the year, resting during the Sunwolves-Blues swing might have made plenty of sense given last year’s results but things have changed in the first third of the 2019 season.
The Sunwolves proved again, on their day, they’re equipped to beat good teams and the Blues are now running hot; having won their last three games.
The Waratahs say they’ll be getting down to business on Monday to fix the flaws in their game that led to the loss in Newcastle.
“To sum it up briefly, a lot of it comes down to us giving the ball back cheaply,” Cron said.
“So execution, knock ons, forward passes, kicking the ball out on the full, a whole lot of time when we should have been building pressure we probably reduced the pressure valve on them. You can see that leading to their tries.
“The key thing across the park is that we execute. The smallest of errors in Super Rugby looks like a car crash and we made a couple of errors on errors, so it culminated in tries to them.”
The Waratahs’ attempts to use a kick-based strategy against the Sunwolves but with almost none of the success they’d enjoyed a week earlier against the Crusaders.
They kicked 36 times in a game where Gibson said post-match they’d looked best when they held the ball.
“As coaches you should also take a look and see if your messages got across clearly, and what’s the reason or the poor execution. Was it the way it was set-up? Or we were clear on the messaging? Quite possibly, looking at the game, some of the kicks we made were just quick turnovers,” Cron said.
“We didn’t kick for purpose. And as a result we gave them ball 10 metres away from where we had been carrying it. I will sit down on Monday and have a look at what we did execute around our kicking game and how much pressure that put on us.”
Cron said blaming the loss on not having three rested Wallabies is a mistake.
“Our defeat against the Sunwolves, it’s a team performance. It’s not down to a couple of guys rotated,” he said.
One player they don’t have to rest is Karmichael Hunt but NSW may be wise to rotate him positionally and back into the sky blue no.12.
The Blues welcomed Sonny-Bill Williams back to their ranks against the Stormers at the weekend and he made a big impact.
NSW no.12 Kurtley Beale made several defensive mistakes against the Sunwolves but Cron said they wouldn’t be basing their thoughts on stopping SBW alone.
“If you focus too much on one guy you will get eaten up by one of the others,” he said.
“You can see in the past if you focus on a player or a specific person, they’ll beat you out wide. They offer threats across the park. I think the key for us is we have some serious depth in that midfield at the Waratahs and it is working out who’s best to play that game.”
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