it favoured the hosts<\/a>, but with competition rife for positions, Salakaia-Loto brushed it off.<\/p>\n\u201cThe boys are excited. I don\u2019t know where the whole second-string thing is coming from …Everyone that’s playing this week is an opportunity for us to take the team forward and really keep improving on what we want to improve\u00a0and keep bettering the team,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of the day, we\u2019re just worrying about ourselves and what we\u2019ve got to do and getting our s*** in order so I guess anything outside noise is irrelevant to us.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you were to call Nick Champion de Crespigny second-string, I\u2019d run fast if you said that to him. <\/p>\n
“We\u2019re just excited to play this week, a lot of boys getting some game time after some time out.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the returning players is winger Dylan Piestch, who has remarkably recovered from a nasty jaw injury.<\/p>\n
Pietsch surprised doctors and fans alike with his rapid healing after a nasty collision with Siya Kolisi left the Force star bloodied.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a pretty abrupt collision. I noticed pretty much straight away,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had my mouth shut for a week. It was actually going a lot better than what we initially thought.\u00a0We initially thought it would be six to eight weeks with my mouth shut on a liquid diet, but that only lasted a week.<\/p>\n
\u201cI couldn’t clench my jaw for a couple of weeks.\u00a0I was sitting there trying to gym with my mouth open. It looked a bit weird to most boys.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was definitely a hard rehab. Probably the hardest I’ve gone through mentally.\u00a0Not being able to do a lot, not being able to talk or eat or anything like that was pretty challenging.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m so glad to be back now. To be here with this group is really special.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wallabies lock Lukhan Salakaia-Loto says prop Aidan Ross is \u2018like no other\u2019 as he prepares to join an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":236209,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85,138029,2500],"class_list":{"0":"post-236208","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-rugby","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-spring-tour","13":"tag-wallabies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}