Wallabies captain Harry Wilson hailed the leadership of his cricketing counterpart Pat Cummins, and revealed how advice on the importance of team harmony from Justin Langer – the coach who took over after the Sandpaper scandal – has risen to prominence after a heavy loss to England.
Wilson is famously cricket-mad and is good mates with three-Test batsman Nathan McSweeney. Footage of a long-handled 35-ball century by Wilson while at school in Brisbane goes viral every now and then.
So, as the Wallabies prepare for their clash with Scotland on Monday morning (AEDT), Wilson has also been following all the twists and turns of Sandpapergate Redux back home.
“Obviously, I don’t know the situation, but I thought Pat Cummins’ 70-minute press conference yesterday was pretty impressive, and that was some of the best leadership I’ve ever seen by an Australian leader, in my time observing it all,” Wilson said.
“It’s a bit of a crazy time back in Australia right now, but I really hope I see that Test team just come together as one and have a great summer.”
Asked if there was anything to be learned from the saga for Australian rugby, Wilson revealed advice Langer have him when he spent time with the Wallabies in Perth ahead of their clash with the Springboks in September.
Langer took over as coach of the Australian cricket team in 2018, following Darren Lehmann’s resignation in the wake of the sandpaper scandal in Cape Town.
“It just shows how tight you want your dressing room to be, and you don’t want those fractures,” Wilson said in Edinburgh.
“Justin Langer, he came and spoke to us before the South Africa game, and he questioned us on how close is our changing room, because you’re only as good as your changing room, and he challenged us on that.
“That’s something we’ve really reflected on, and I believe we’ve got a really good changing room. We’re at a place where we want to challenge each other, we want to be better, and we want to keep moving forward as a group.”
A few days after Langer’s visit, the Wallabies stunned the world no.1 Springboks with a memorable 42-38 victory, in which they were reduced to 11 men in the dying stages.
Australia hasn’t been able to replicate it since, however. They subsequently got thrashed in two games against New Zealand, and were then humbled by England in a record defeat last weekend in London.
Though well and truly overshadowed by the raging bushfire in Aussie cricket, it’s also been a very bleak week for Aussie rugby. But after another “tough review”, Wilson said the team’s harmony had not frayed throughout their current slump, and they’d collectively vowed to respond with force against Scotland.
“We’re challenging the group to bring some edge this weekend from minute one and really impose our game onto the Scots. We’ve brought it at training, but now we’re bringing on the 80 minutes, which is ultimately all that matters this week,” Wilson said.
“I guess we won’t be forgetting about what happened last week, and everyone will be having that memory somewhere to make sure we have that extra edge, because we want to be that pack, be that team which goes out there and has a bit of edge and really gets into the fight.
“Seven days is a long time in rugby, and we need to show it’s a long time in rugby because we need to be better. I’ve got so much confidence in this group tomorrow to go out there and do Australia proud, but we’ve got to do it.”
Wilson said they’d looked back at some clips of the South Africa win to remind themselves of “what we do when we’re at our best, how hard we work for each other, just the ruthless mindset we had there”.
Wilson believes the team will have more clarity in their defensive system, which has undergone tweaks under the Les Kiss regime.
“We’ve obviously had teams who have probably worked out our weaknesses in it, and really put it under pressure over the last few weeks, and we’ve really tried to go back to the basics of what we’ve implemented and where we’ve been getting unstuck,” he said. “I believe we’ve got a lot more clarity this week because it’s probably been a few weeks of teams testing this in the same way, and we haven’t been able to adapt to it. So we’ve got a really clear plan this week.
“We’re going to double down on our defence, because we really believe that this sort of defence will get this team to that next level. Obviously, we haven’t seen it over the last three weeks, but we can make it easier for ourselves.”
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Iain Payten is a senior sports reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.
