Fear of having peaked in the pool stages will probably not be keeping Michael Cheika and Australia awake at night. Not even losing David Pocock and Israel Folau to injury may disturb their slumber. Teams on a roll tend to sleep well. As long as the coach tells his charges that they have hardly started and finds a few (rare) video bits of imperfection against Fiji, Uruguay, England and Wales, the Wallabies should be able to concentrate on the imperative to improve.
No dip in application can be tolerated, they will be telling themselves – no complacency now that the pool of death has been successfully navigated, no relaxation because Sunday’s game is against only the runners-up from the quirky but ultimately less taxing Pool B. Scotland are no mugs, they will be reciting. No yellow cards, Will Genia and Dean Mumm will be repeating to themselves; no shoulder-charging the breakdown, Michael Hooper will be reminded. Hard to resist, he may be muttering to himself – but resist he must. The ban next time might not be so lenient.
They will be saying all that and urging themselves to be better and better again but, goodness, it is a tall order because they have been startlingly impressive already. It is hard to believe that they were not so long ago a laughing stock, disjointed on the field and troublesome off it.
Now they are good old Aussie all-round top blokes, chucked into the deep end and told to swim or sink. Here they are, untainted by any of the toxins in the pool of death and ready to face Scotland.
The contributions of the back row are well documented. Pocock and Hooper were the most visible and lauded duet in the combinations but Scott Fardy has been every bit as indispensable on the blind side. Ben McCalman, in the absence of Pocock, has a chance to offer his own forthrightness at the outset. Having taken a punt on a double-7 combo, Cheika seems to have inspired all his back-rows to play with aggression and speed.
The discovery of Scott Sio on the loosehead side of the front row is pinpointed as the selection that upped the fighting capability of the scrum but, as Mario Ledesma has pointed out, scrummaging is never a one-man thing. As he crawls in and out of the tunnel and twists in between the legs of the scrummagers and prods and pokes at the torsos above him, the old Argentina hooker has made the pack believe that everything becomes easier if the scrum goes well. They believe him and they push with the zeal of the converted.
And everything Ledesma has said has come true. Genia is re-energised at scrum-half, protected by the pack in front of him and fortified by the prospect of making something very special of Bernard Foley at 10. The outside-half is 26, which comes as a bit of a surprise – if only because he has brought the exuberance of youth to the position – but with Genia’s service and the steadying presence of Matt Giteau outside him he has every reason to believe that he can make the whole team tick.
Cheika has chosen a twinset of playmakers in Foley and Giteau, spinners of dreams, left to muse on the options while the packhorses carry the heavy loads. Kane Douglas is prodigious in defence from the second row, while Tevita Kuridrani and Adam Ashley‑Cooper drive the defensive line. For every example of smooth control there is a corresponding act of courage in defence. The Wallabies have not flinched.
Can they carry on rising? Whatever they tell themselves, they will probably need to wake – or be rudely awakened by Scotland, who will savour the scrap at the breakdown – from a sluggishness that is bound to go with emerging from Pool A unbeaten.
As they will tell themselves later, it is not how one starts a game but how one finishes. Progress may not be smooth but it should remain upward and Australia can sleep easy again.
