They’ve put 9616 kilometres and seven timezones between themselves and the Israel Folau saga but the Waratahs say they’ll still embrace a “siege mentality” on their tour of South Africa in the next fortnight.
A morale-sapping defeat to the Sharks at Bankwest Stadium on Saturday continued the win-loss rollercoaster for NSW this year and left them with an urgent need to pick up points over their next three weeks on the road.
A Bulls-Lions-Reds swing is not easy but even with the Super Rugby ladder tightly congested, moving season is about to get underway and every point will be like gold in the run home to the playoffs.
The Waratahs sit in second in the Aussie conference but only six points separates first to fourth - Rebels (24), NSW (20) , Brumbies (20), Reds (18).
The Waratahs will need to overturn recent history to pocket points: they haven’t won in Pretoria in 17 years, when now assistant coach Chris Whitaker was still playing. And their last victory in Johannesburg was in 2009.
They'll also have to overcome the losses of four regulars, with Jack Dempsey (back), Tolu Latu (calf) and Rory O'Connor (ribs) injured and Jed Holloway dealing with the judiciary over his red card.
So while they will manage to escape the spotlight in Sydney, and avoid Folau’s code of conduct hearing on Saturday, the Waratahs are look to keep the wagons circled in Africa, according to hooker Damian Fitzpatrick.
"Tours are galvanising, that’s for sure,” Fitzpatrick said post-game on Saturday.
"Hoops just said in the sheds that we now have got an opportunity go over and almost a bit of a siege mentality (against) two South African teams.
"The guys have handled the last few weeks really well, I think anyway. We’re not trying to escape what’s gone on, but tours just generally will galvanise a group and I think on the back of tonight it’s a pretty good opportunity for us to get away and try and spend some time together and go after these two games.”
Hooper delivered a similar message in the press conference, and pointed towards the success of the Brumbies and Reds in Africa in recent weeks.
"Touring is a good thing. You get to go away, you get away from distraction,” he said.
“We’re not dead in the water yet. There is still a heap to go. Aussie teams have done well in Africa this year. We have so much opportunity and potential there to go and play some good rugby.”
Unlike the Brumbies, however, the Waratahs haven’t fared well across the Indian Ocean.
Since beating the Lions in 2009, they’ve won only four of their subsequent 18 matches.
Playing on the high veldt is tought but two games in a row at altitude may be of some advantage in terms of acclimatising for the second week’s clash with the Lions.
“Maybe, one blessing, is that you learn from the first week and you go into the second week, as opposed to maybe playing at sea level and then going to Highveld,” Fitzpatrick said.
"To be honest, I’ve never done it. I’ve always gone from sea level or one of the other, I’ve never done two in a row."
How NSW approach their African games is another question: the red and yellow cards that arrived with the scores locked at 10-0 all against the Sharks clouded the picture of whether their gameplan would have born fruit in the fourth quarter.
"I suppose It’s difficult to see where we would have been, obviously if the circumstances were different, we felt like we had a pretty good understanding on when and how and where we wanted to play and where we wanted to do that, and it was obviously targeting the back end of that second half understood they were big fellas and we obviously targeted the second half to try and put our game into shape and score some points there,” Fitzpatrick said.
The hooker admitted, however, that their standards had not been good in the opening 45 minutes.
"I think everybody was guilty of one or two errors there at crucial times,” Fitzpatrick said.
"Myself, first lineout in our gold zone, overcooked that throw, we had a couple of other chances as well where blokes just dropped the ball and when you’re 20 minutes into the game you don’t know how many of those moments you’re going to get and you try to move on from it, but looking back we probably blew some in those first 50 as well.”
Gibson pointed to the fact that now they’re without the try-scoring heavy lifters of 2018 - Taqele Naiyaravoro and Israel Folau - there can be errors in converting opportunities into tries.
The Waratahs are bottom half of the competition for tries scored in 2019.
"A lot of that try scoring came out of two blokes, we acknowledged that,” Gibson said.
"But we are certainly putting ourselves into positions to score tries and not taking them as well as we could. We had some nice field position early in that game, two missed lineouts, overthrown at the back. We are not capitalising on those critical moments, and not executing that stuff. When you are short on try-scoring, that’s going to hurt you.”
