Wallabies keep faith in scrum despite Irish upset

AUSTRALIA have played down concerns about their scrum wobbles after their forwards were trounced in the 15-6 defeat to Ireland on Saturday.

The Wallabies conceded a string of penalties in the defeat, often for an illegal bind or collapsing, as the Irish front row of Cian Healy, Rory Best and Mike Ross destroyed Sekope Kepu, Tatafu Polota-Nau and Ben Alexander in the set piece.

Assistant coach David Nucifora, a former Australia hooker, defended the Wallabies’ scrum, however, saying it had “dominated” World Cup hosts New Zealand and world champions South Africa during Tri-Nations matches in the lead-up.

“Our scrum’s gone well this year,” Nucifora insisted in Wellington. “We put the All Blacks and the Springboks under a lot of pressure and dominated them in recent matches, so it’s not an issue for us.

“The Irish scrummed well the other night, we scrummed inconsistently. What we’ve got to fix is our consistency and our application to that. We don’t have any issues with our scrum.”

The Wallabies also repeatedly fell for the Irish ploy of holding players up off the ground, which turned the attack into a maul rather than a ruck and cost turnovers, but Nucifora denied his players had been caught off-guard.

“We all play each other enough times, there’s no surprises here for any of us,” he said tersely. “We’re up in the north every November playing all these teams, so that’s not a reason or an excuse for our performance the other night.

“We were just outplayed... (and) it’s a matter of the team collectively understanding what didn’t go well and what did and fixing the things that didn’t work for us.”

Nucifora explained Wallaby flanker David Pocock has made “massive improvement” recovering from a back injury but it was still too early to tell if he would be available for the Wallabies’ match against the United States.

“We have to see how he comes along and improves over the next day or two,” Nucifora said. “At this point we’re hopeful. If you saw him on match day last week and see him now — it’s a massive improvement.”

Winger Digby Ioane is the only other injury concern for the Wallabies as they prepare to take on the US in Wellington on Friday.

Both Ioane and Nucifora said the team’s video de-briefing of the Ireland match on Monday had not been enjoyable. “We know the areas we didn’t perform as well as we should have,” Nucifora said. “We are going to have to improve in those areas. It was straightforward and there for everyone to see. We just have to get better.”