Australia ready to scrum for 80 minutes against England
TOKYO, Oct 16, (RTRS): Australia prop Scott Sio said the Wallabies pack would be ready to scrum for 80 minutes when they face England in the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals in Oita on Saturday.
England monstered Australia at the scrum in the 2007 quarter-finals, with the Wallabies taking their revenge in the 2015 pool match which sent the hosts crashing out of their own tournament.
Scrummaging is in the DNA of English rugby, however, and Sio knows the Australian forwards will have to be prepared for another mighty scrap at the weekend.
“If we have to scrum every minute of the 80 minutes, we’re ready to do that as well,” loosehead Sio told reporters.
“It’s just being prepared for any situation that comes in there, but once you know the ball is knocked on it’s ready to go, it’s about connecting, getting the right messages to the forward pack and then providing a solid base there for our backs.” The Wallabies knocked the ball on more than they would have liked in slippery conditions in their final pool match but dominated the vaunted Georgian scrum in the set piece.
Georgia’s captain said after the match that the Wallabies now had one of the best scrums in the world and the England camp have been sending out the message this week that the days when the Australians could be shoved around the park were gone.
How much of that is gamesmanship remains to be seen but Sio said the set scrum had a nasty way of bringing front-rowers back down to earth if they ever got overconfident.
“It’s a day-by-day, scrum-by-scrum,” he added.
“It’s just trusting in each other, we understand scrummaging is as an eight, it’s not just the guys up front ... we understand as a group if we’re all firing together, that’s what I believe makes a successful scrum.” Sio, who turned 28 on Wednesday, was given his first name because he was born while his father was in Edinburgh with the Western Samoa squad preparing to play Scotland in the quarter-finals of the 1991 World Cup.
He made his own World Cup debut in 2015 and has been pretty much first choice loosehead ever since, despite coach Michael Cheika frequently spinning the selection wheel in other parts of the team.
“But we know we have to go up another level this week.” Jonny May will win his 50th cap when England play Australia in Saturday’s quarter-final, but things might have turned out differently if he had not stayed sober on the last weekend of the team’s tour of Argentina in 2013.
With the British and Irish Lions touring New Zealand, then-coach Stuart Lancaster had taken an experimental squad to South America. The uncapped May was overlooked for the first Test and then failed to make the cut again for the second.
Disappointed and a little embarrassed, as he had invited his parents out to watch him play, he went for dinner with them the night before the final match.
“Then Christian Wade got called up for the Lions on the morning of the game,” May told journalists on Wednesday, explaining how he had become the last winger standing.
All the other players not involved in the matchday had been out drinking. “So I got, ‘go on you can play’,” May said.
“Funny how it works out – I ended up starting, so a challenging week finished on a good note,” he said.