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Wallabies coach Dave Rennie indicated flyhalf Noah Lolesio has done enough to keep his place for the second Test in Sydney after the most assured performance of his young career against the All Blacks.
While Marika Koroibete was a clear player of the match after his try-saving, and scoring, heroics, Lolesio stood tall under pressure imposed by his standards and his failure to lock down the No.10 jersey.
The Wallabies needed a mature response to a flood of Springbok possession after the Australians took an early lead.
Lolesio admitted he hadn’t been happy with how he finished the series against England, where he wore the No.10 for all three games. He was subsequently dropped for Quade Cooper and James O’Connor was preferred for the disappointing defeat in San Juan.
“I’ve been through a shaky couple of weeks for myself after that English game,” Lolesio said.
“I probably took three, four weeks to have a solid look at my game and how I wanted to approach it. But I was a little bit nervous heading to this game, to be honest.
“But as soon as I found out I was playing, I tried to do everything in my will every day to put up the performance that not only myself I deserve, but the whole country deserves as well.
(Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
“So I’m very happy with the performance but again, we won’t get too ahead of ourselves. We know we can play very well. But the challenge for us now is to be consistent.”
Rennie said the coaching staff was “really happy” for Lolesio, who has seen another veteran in Bernard Foley come into the camp.
“As we said going into the game, he’s played a lot of big footy, he’s played multiple Tests against New Zealand and England and France; so we had confidence that he would do the job and I thought he was excellent,” said Rennie.
Asked if he did enough to warrant some selection loyalty for the rest of The Rugby Championship, Rennie replied:
“We talk about earning the right to wear the jersey and he did that today. We played a big chunk of the game without the ball in that first half.
“But our ability to react and be clinical when it counted – you look at Marika’s try just after halftime and Noah’s understanding rather than slow the ball down and try and go around the edge.
“He’s a confident kid. We talked a lot about playing flatter and playing on top of the defensive line, smart kicking options, so it was good to see that from him today.”
Rennie said Lolesio had been downcast about the third Test against England.
“That’s good,” he said. “We want everyone striving to be as good as they can be. And he’s setting high standards for himself.”
Rennie recently complained that his message wasn’t getting through to the players, and O’Connor was seemingly cast aside because he failed to implement the game plan set by the coaches.
Another bugbear of Rennie’s was the poor starts from his team, which they addressed stunningly with a Fraser McReight try with one minute, two seconds on the clock.
“We prepared really well, it’s no guarantee to performance, but I’m rapt with the way we started,” said Rennie.
“We got 10-0 up and then we had possession again, and then we showed an enormous amount of character to defend for the next 20 odd minutes, at times down to 14, so you saw great examples; a really important defensive scrum, where we won a penalty, Marika getting across for the try-saver, so that was really important.
” And then we started the second half well again, I think the next 20 we dominated, and then as you’d expect from South Africa they came back and asked a lot of questions late. So we’re rapt with the result, and we’re well aware of the challenge of next week and backing that up, which we haven’t done this year.”