As Australia prepare for a monumental clash with the world No 1 Springboks the coach is taking heart from this side’s belief and resilience
E Top dogs at Rugby Australia HQ are generally suited and booted but Les Kiss, with his goatee and spectacles, gets about in jeans, sneakers and baseball cap. Short but spry, wiry like a yoga teacher, husky like a barfly, the Wallabies coach is about to face the biggest challenge – some say the greatest beatdown – of his professional life.
“We have the Springboks in front of us next Sunday,” Kiss says. “It’s a massive opportunity to challenge a fantastic team that is second to none in the world. An opportunity to challenge ourselves too. We won’t shy away; we’ll take it on. This 80 minutes will be a representation of where we’re at – and who we are.”
The cold facts are Australia are the No 7-ranked rugby nation in the world and South Africa are No 1 by a country mile. The Springboks flew into Sydney on Wednesday after three straight victories over the All Blacks (a team Australia haven’t beaten since 2020), another scary reminder that Rassie Erasmus’s side are rugby’s true superpower and heavy favourites for a third consecutive World Cup in 13 months’ time.
But Kiss is brimming with belief. He has seen a documentary about “Move 32”, a fabled strategic play that enabled an AI computer to defeat the greatest human mind in the game of Go. The details run deep but the move turned traditional wisdom on its head, defied millennia of human instinct, and preceded an upset for the ages. “When you’re not constrained by conventions, anything is possible isn’t it?” he says.
“Look at David Campese – unconventional, unconstrained, unpredictable. That’s ‘the Wallaby Way’. The beauty of those skills is you understand the moment, you feel the game, you sense what’s important now. It’s a sweet spot that seems mysteriously out of reach until there’s enough firepower or brain power as a group to let it happen.”
Is he saying the Wallabies have a Move 32 ready for Sunday’s Test? “Writing that wouldn’t help us, mate,” he laughs. “It would make things much worse.” Instead, Australian fans will have to draw inspiration from three sources: the team’s unbeaten four-Test run under Kiss, the fact the men in gold scored a famous victory against the Springboks only last year, and their coach’s close-up knowledge of Erasmus.
“My first job in rugby was with South Africa and I learned rugby through the eyes of the Springboks,” Kiss says of his two-year stint in 2001-02 as their defence coach. “Rassie was in his final year as a player then. I got to know him better when he was at Munster and I was in the Irish national set-up. As a player and a coach he’s a very savvy operator. Rassie thinks of the game differently and is always true to himself.”
Where Kiss is a mathematician, drawing from the Sicilian defence in chess as much as his days as a rugby league winger, Erasmus is a maverick. Against New Zealand, he sprayed referees and rivals in the media, swapped his front-row an hour before kick-off and indulged in heavy gamesmanship, on field and off. It all worked.
“What he’s done with the national side is pretty special,” says Kiss. “It’s taken a lot of time to build but he’s been backed, and he gets results when he needs them. Two World Cups in a row speaks to that. He’s also built unbelievable depth. Let’s face it: he’s got four first-XVs and has quality and talent three or four deep in every position.”
The Wallabies can only dream of such reserves. Kiss is doing his best to pump game time and Kiss culture into every Wallaby wannabe, but for all the weapons out wide, he remains hamstrung by injuries to his playmakers. His unbeaten run so far is partly down to rips from the Erasmus playbook, flipping sides match-by-match, endorsing enforcers, unleashing bomb squads off the bench, all to create depth and diversity.
Two-time World Cup midfielder and one-time prodigy Jordan Petaia is the latest, recalled after stints in the NFL and club rugby in France to apply pressure on golden boy Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii whose lightning remains frustratingly bottled at No 13.
However, he resisted the temptation to recall flyhalf James O’Connor, who masterminded the Wallabies’ freakish comeback victory in Johannesburg last year.
Kiss draws inspiration from that boilover to dream of another next weekend. “The big thing in that game was that the Wallabies never looked beaten, even when the scoreline was not good [22-0 after 18 minutes]. They kept coming. That belief and resilience is incredibly strong in this squad and it’s evolving every Test. We’ve got work to do but take your eye off us, we’ll come back and bite you.”