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Rugby league recruits Mark Nawaqanitawase, Zac Lomax and Angus Crichton are also in contention for the World Cup side but there is precious little time for experimentation before the tournament kicks off with Australia v Hong Kong in Perth in October next year.<\/p>\n
Ryan Lonergan appears to have cemented his place at scrum half, but at fly half the Wallabies have been unable to settle since the last World Cup, and Carter Gordon broke his leg against Argentina and will now miss the coming matches against South Africa and New Zealand.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat five-eighth is obviously a really important position in any rugby team, and for us at the Wallabies, we just want a bit of stability there,\u201d Slipper said. \u201cIt\u2019s a shame for Carter but it gives an opportunity to someone else to come in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ben Donaldson is the likely candidate having started for the Wallabies in their last test against Argentina, but there have been calls to bring in Japan-based Noah Lolesio who appeared first choice under previous coach Joe Schmidt until injuring his neck last year.<\/p>\n
Veterans Bernard Foley, 37, and James O\u2019Connor, 36, have also returned to Australian Super Rugby clubs ahead of the World Cup. Slipper said they were serious about their Wallabies ambitions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe World Cup, it comes down to performance doesn\u2019t it?\u201d he said. \u201cSo you want your best players out there playing the game in those big games, and Bernard\u2019s done that in 2015, he took us all the way to a World Cup final, so he\u2019s been there, he\u2019s done that before.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd Rabs [O\u2019Connor] has been around for a long time, he\u2019s been a part of Les [Kiss\u2019s] at the Reds. They\u2019ve got a lot of experience, both those players, and essentially it\u2019s going to come down to who\u2019s in good form, who\u2019s performing at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He is known as the Wallabies\u2019 foremost code-switcher, and there are growing calls for him to settle on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":886733,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-886732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886732","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=886732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886732\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/886733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=886732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=886732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=886732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}