Aussies delighted with first Rugby Championship title

Australia’s Wallabies with their Rugby Championship trophy after defeating New Zealand’s All Blacks in Sydney, 8 August – REUTERS

Reuters: Australia stunned world champions New Zealand 27-19 on Saturday (8 August) to claim a first Rugby Championship title in the fourth year of the competition and a welcome boost ahead of the World Cup.

Nic White came off the bench to score a penalty and a converted try which settled a contest that had see-sawed back and forth for the best part of 70 minutes, giving the Wallabies a first win over the All Blacks since they won the final Tri-Nations in 2011.

Prop Sekope Kepu and winger Adam Ashley-Cooper also crossed for the Australians, who will win back the Bledisloe Cup for the first time since 2002 if they can beat their neighbours in Auckland next week.

New Zealand winger Nehe Milner-Skudder scored two tries on debut and flyhalf Dan Carter kicked three penalties, but it was not enough to prevent the All Blacks falling to only a third defeat since winning the World Cup in 2011.

Australia head coach Michael Cheika appeared to be damping down expectations when he told a news conference afterwards: “You can’t wipe away, you know, 50 good things someone does with one bad thing and it works in the reverse as well. You don’t just say ‘oh well, you’ve won once in quite a long time and you think you’ve done anything special’, you know. It’s just about preparation, trying to improve every day and we’ll try and improve again tomorrow because this is the path that we have to go on if we’re going to be competitive consistently going forward, you know, so yeah it was nice for the lads, but it’s an abridged Rugby Championship so really it’s nice to have won that but it’s still only the three games so we want to test ourselves over more and more and more games.”

“Look, I’m just glad we improved on last week, that’s what we wanted to do. We didn’t focus too much on the outcome but I was proud of how the boys dug in for each other so, yeah, happy with the outcome,” added Wallabies captain and hooker Stephen Moore.

All Blacks head coach Steve Hansen commented: We just got beaten by a better side on the night, you know, and we have to face up to that reality. It is an inconvenient fact but we’ve been here before, you know, we’ve lost games before and it doesn’t mean to say that we’ve become a bad side, there’s just some things in our game that we need to tidy up and we’ll get back to Auckland tomorrow and start that process.”

The Wallabies face the All Blacks at Eden Park in Auckland next Saturday night (15 August).