Who can hold their nerve the best?
The Wallabies have been able to benefit from the Warriors being stuck in Australia, by using the NRL club’s facilities at Mt Smart Stadium.
Instead of having their captain’s run at Eden Park yesterday, the Wallabies chose to break normal convention and have it at Mt Smart Stadium, tapping into the facilities that have largely been gathering dust for two years, with the Warriors forced to relocate to Australia.
Wallabies assistant coach Scott Wisemantel, who played league for the Parramatta Eels between 1988 and 1992, said they’d been impressed with the facilities at Mt Smart Stadium, which perfectly fitted all of their needs.
‘‘We’ve got 42 players, they’ve got a fantastic gym facility there, we’re running two to three squads, so we could have meetings, we could gym and we could cater for everyone today and we got a really meaningful training session out of today for everyone. The ground was perfect, it was brilliant.’’
The Wallabies spent most of the week in Tauranga, before relocating to Auckland on Thursday and they’ll remain in the city ahead of next weekend’s test, again at Eden Park.
Whether using the Warriors’ state-ofthe-art facilities, which were upgraded by the club’s owner Mark Robinson ahead of the 2020 season, but have never been used by the NRL team, has been a help is unknown, but Wisemantel believes the Wallabies will need to stay in the contest for an hour.
‘‘The game is going to have momentum swings, they all do,’’ he said.
‘‘It’s just who can hold their nerve. Hopefully it’s close at the 60 [minute] mark and then last 20 minutes – it’s just who can keep applying the pressure.’’
Wisemantel acknowledged that the All Blacks have a strong team against them for Bledisloe I and that there is plenty of depth in their squad for Ian Foster to pick from.
‘‘It’s a good team, they’ve got so many good players to choose from,’’ he said.
‘‘The thing that sticks out for me is the back row, with [Dalton] Papalii as a fetcher, so they’ve really gone down that route. It’s a well-balanced team.’’
The All Blacks’ bench features three of the Barrett brothers, Beauden, Scott and Jordie, but what stands out to Wisemantel about the All Blacks’ bench is the versatility there is on it.
‘‘What we need to do is grow the skill set of players,’’ he said.
‘‘You look at New Zealand at the moment and that bench, there are guys there who can cover two, three, four positions and that’s what we need to do.
‘‘We need to grow our players so they’re not just specialists. They’re very good in their chosen position, but they can play other positions.’’