It’s inspiration versus desperation

Say something often enough and it eventually becomes accepted as fact. You and I might be part of a team that pumps another 42-8 and feel quite bullish about our chances of beating them again the next week. Not the All Blacks.

No, there’s been no talk about being satisfied with last Saturday’s performance or enjoying the outcome. Instead we’ve been told from the moment that game finished in Sydney that Australia will be better, they are wounded, we expect a ferocious response, there won’t be a remotely similar outcome in Wellington tonight.

And it’s all been for no-one’s benefit but their own. Time will tell whether they ended up believing any of it.

Australia’s main response has been to pick Quade Cooper at first five-eighth. Sport at this level is almost all mental and personnel changes merely cosmetic.

Not this one. Picking Cooper not only brings with it all sorts of unhappy emotional baggage, but the whiff of desperation too.

He’s not the only new player named in the Wallabies and the All Blacks - largely through injury have tinkered with their lineup as well. But it is only tinkering.

This game will be won by the team that’s best prepared in the head, which is why, from head coach Steve Hansen down, New Zealand have drummed the same message home all week.

‘‘It’s about mentally controlling your thought patterns, both individually and collectively as a group, and getting your feet back on the ground firmly and trying not to subconsciously relax,’’ Hansen said.

‘‘It’s about getting your bum from the back of the seat to the edge of it and having that edge that we had last week. We prepared really well last week, both physically and mentally, and to be in the game this week we have to do the same thing.

‘‘The picture won’t be the same. The painting we drew last week will be different because the opposition will be different for a start and we’re going to have to find a way to win being different. That’s the sign of a good team, if they can do that.

‘‘But it’s challenging for us and we’ll learn some more about ourselves after this game.’’

Beyond the result, there will be targets for most of the backline to meet. Fullback Ben Smith is pretty close to the finished article, but there remain a few unknowns about the others.

The Wallabies are playing for credibility. Everything about their programme - and its place in the Australia sporting market - is now under scrutiny and coach Michael Cheika has appeared to have a worrying lack of ideas about how to get the best out of what he has.

He primed the team up for a month before the Sydney test, so what they rolled out was pretty poor, as was his body language afterwards, which bore all the hallmarks of a defeated man.

Cheika has been a little more combative since arriving in Wellington, bristling at the suggestion he’d named a do-or-die lineup for a do-or-die occasion.

‘‘Any team I pick is in the same situation ... this team has got to react from last week, no doubt about that. But if we were coming over here in a different situation you’d want them to react regardless, [because] we haven’t over here in a very long time,’’ Cheika.

‘‘I know we’re looking for the headline but not matter what happened, or has happened, it would always be the same coming here to play because it’s always a difficult opponent and it’s going to be a very, very tough game.’’

"It's about getting your bum from the back of the seat to the edge of it." Steve Hansen