KEY POINTS:
As a player, one annoying thing about rugby is that when your team plays well and wins, the elation only lasts until about midday the next day. Then comes the realisation that unless you back it up the next weekend, it all counts for nought. All that good
work you have to go and do again. It puts you on edge.
On the other hand, if you lose, you are in a bad temper until about midday the next day when you understand you have the chance to atone in six days. Suddenly you feel a bit chirpier.
Lose and you're chirpy, win and you're edgy. Life's a bitch.
The good thing about winning is that once you get to the next game, there should be momentum and confidence from the previous performance.
Australia is slowly falling in love with this Wallabies team but there could be a cool patch in the burgeoning relationship if they don't combine a week of edginess with an effort at Eden Park that contains healthy portions of momentum and confidence.
The All Blacks have some skill issues, coming out of Sydney, that won't make them feel chirpy. But despite plenty of errors, they might argue that a different call on the Peter Hynes tackle on Sitiveni Sivivatu could have altered the result.
Maybe last week's game has partly faded into irrelevance for both teams and all it has really done is put them in different moods in the lead-up.
Something's going to determine the winning and the losing but just what will it be?
Before the Wallabies' first Tri-Nations game a fortnight ago in Perth, there was much debate about how the Springboks would perform. There were two trains of thought. One was that, buoyed by their victory in Dunedin and before heading home for a three-week spell, they'd be pumped full of energy for the entire 80 minutes. The other was that the two games in New Zealand had sapped them physically and mentally and they'd be weakened in the closing stages.
Once the game had been played and the result was known, everyone wanted to be on the latter train. The carriages of hindsight are always overcrowded.
The Wallabies are about to play their third on the trot. Can they last the distance?
My view on fatigue is that the more you talk about it, the more tired you get. Players can be convinced by outside sources how tired they are when in fact, if nobody brought up the issues that supposedly made their pre-match workload so heavy, they'd just get on with things with a spring in their step and no fear of running out of puff.
One of the pleasing aspects for Wallabies supporters in the opening two Tri-Nations games has been the team's capacity to run on strongly at the end of those matches. Both games, and particularly the one in Sydney, were played at a far greater tempo than the previous matches against Ireland and France in which the ELVs had not been used.
When a lot of us expected the Wallabies to be struggling against the All Blacks deep into the match, it was the men in gold who looked freshest. Rodney So'oialo's team seemed spent when Rocky Elsom scored his try.
The fitness base provided by their strength and conditioning coach as well as the timely use of the bench players have been two of the key factors in Australia's early successes. For all the debate about set play and breakdown battles, one-on-one confrontations and the advantage of having an extra play-maker, it may be the overall fitness and the performances of numbers 16 through 22 that could prove the decisive factors.
More than ever before, rugby is an 80-minute game and the team that lasts best tomorrow may be the one lucky enough to be feeling edgy come midday Sunday.
* Andrew Slack is a former Wallabies captain.
