At a glance
What: Super Rugby Pacific, round 10: Hurricanes v Brumbies.
Where and when:
4.35pm today.
Coverage: Live on Sky Sport 1, live updates on Stuff.
Hurricanes: Ruben Love, Kini Naholo, Peter Umaga-Jensen, Jordie Barrett, Salesi Rayasi, Brett Cameron, TJ Perenara, Brayden Iose, Du’Plessis Kirifi, Brad Shields (capt), Isaia Walker-Leawere, Caleb Delany, Tyrel Lomax, James O’Reilly, Xavier Numia. Reserves: Raymond Tuputupu, Tevita Mafileo, Pasilio Tosi, Ben Grant, Peter Lakai, Richard Judd, Riley Higgins, Bailyn Sullivan.
Brumbies: Tom Wright, Ollie Sapsford, Len Ikitau, Tamati Tua, Corey Toole, Noah Lolesio, Ryan Lonergan (capt), Charlie Cale, Rory Scott, Rob Valetini, Cadeyrn Neville, Darcy Swain, Allan Alaalatoa, Billy Pollard, James Slipper.
Reserves: Connal McInerney, Blake Schoupp, Sosefo Kautai, Tom Hooper, Jahrome Brown, Harrison Goddard, Jack Debreczeni, Andy Muirhead.
GIO Stadium, Canberra.;
there to make us problem solvers and thinkers, and we're learning, which is great.”
The win in Fiji also epitomised Laidlaw and his bid to be one step ahead. Some of that stems from the pain of the 2015 final defeat and the 2021 gold medal match; both times where Laidlaw felt their opponents - the Highlanders and Fiji sevens respectively - caught them on the hop with something they hadn’t planned for.
In the leadup the Hurricanes conducted team meetings in the heat room at their Upper Hutt base to acclimatise, and trained for what panned out in the second half when three yellow cards reduced them to 13 against the Drua. Every week they train for a different scenario that might otherwise cause the wheels to fall off, Jane says.
“We’d trained with numbers down that week that we’d lost Izzy [Walker-Leawere] and he got sin binned anyway - Jordie going on the side of the scrum, the boys were quite comfortable doing that. It didn’t look like we panicked even though the boys were under it. I thought they played better with numbers down than when we had 15.”
They defended stoutly on their line, held the Drua then instead of settling for kicking the ball out and taking the win, broke out and scored the bonus point try to Numia.
Then there’s fitness. The obvious correlation with Laidlaw’s sevens background is fair, but the term ‘mental fitness’ is more applicable, say those inside the camp.
“Energy and effort is what he preaches,” says Jane. “He came in and said ‘work hard, but how do they know they can’t work harder?’. That was the mentality in pre-season - that’s the horizon, let’s go over it. I was worried, I thought our props would end up being about 70kg because they were flying around the place in pre-season.
“He challenged everyone to work a little bit harder than what we think we can. Let’s push ourselves. Everyone bought into it and you can see we’re a fit team.”