With new changes and a potential debutant in Kalani Thomas, head coach Joe Schmidt hopes his Wallabies side can end a ‘frustrating’ tour on a high note and deliver a first victory in Saint-Denis for the first time since 2016.
With the players getting a full day off on Monday to take a break from rugby, Schmidt hopes it will provide the physical and mental refresh his players need, with the coach also conceding the long season has been one of the hardest he’s undertaken in his long career.
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"I've found it really frustrating, to be honest," Schmidt told reporters when asked about his assessment of the tour. "Just because I do see that improvement in some of the players for sure. When improvement isn't rewarded, there's frustration."
“When you over-chase something, you always make yourself a little bit more vulnerable, and that's part of the learning. It's frustrating to go through a learning period and not have the apparent reward that a result gives you.
“I can tell you, I know how hard the players are working and what it means to them, and they are frustrated that they feel like they've let supporters down.
“This week, we didn't train on Monday at all. We try to cut our cloth to how people are feeling, and you cannot flog a dead horse. And I've never, ever been in a test window for so long. I think the longest period that I've had a break for was eight days since we started. I think, as much as anything, it's mental, emotional fatigue as much as it is physical. So that in itself has been challenging.
“That doesn't mean that you completely change your approach, but it does mean you definitely adjust it. We've tried to adjust as the season has progressed, and I'm not saying we get the adjustments right. We just try to get them right with as much foresight as we can.”
Schmidt has named Carter Gordon to lead the side around this weekend at Stade de France, the head coach partnering him with Jake Gordon, while also providing a fresh injection by naming Kalani Thomas to potentially make his debut off the bench.
“I'm hopeful that Carter gets through captain's run tomorrow,” Schmidt said of Gordon’s progress.
“We pulled him out a little bit early today because we're trying to build him into the game, but I felt he trained really well, ran the team really well, kicked out of his hand well in the actual training session. He's an exciting prospect, and we've got time to back him up.
“Tane [Edmed] is growing all the time. He's one of the guys who benefited from having James O'Connor in the environment and helping him to understand more about his role, and probably just to understand more about how his role needs to facilitate the roles of others in the game.
“Kalani has trained for five weeks with us. He’s trained incredibly well, he’s got a sharpness about him, and he deserves an opportunity to demonstrate that.
“It’s a tough place to debut, but if we don’t do it now, he’s just spent these five weeks with us; he has to reinvigorate himself again, and we felt this window was a good opportunity for him.”
Schmidt believes that the side’s cohesion built up throughout the course of the year will shine through this weekend, with the head coach also believing the side will benefit in the long run from this tour despite the challenging results.
“In assessing the overall tour, for me, it's just been frustration if it hasn't been rewarded. But I also know that in high-performance sport, that can happen,” the head coach added.
“It would be one of the toughest last couple of weeks that I've had.
“But I do feel that having the experiences that I've had over the 20-odd years of being a professional rugby coach, it does allow me to have some context, and to give them some context that there's not always immediate reward for effort, there's not always immediate reward for improvement.
“The challenge is to be able to stick with that. They're determined to do that because they're incredibly proud of representing their country, and they're incredibly committed to earning the support.
“One of the things is that the players are very keen that we stay on the path we're on. They feel like they're making progress, and so on. The approach is never exactly the same.
“The luxury we'll have at the end of the tour is having some hindsight and seeing how we went and what we might do, maybe a little bit differently in the future.”
