{"id":896458,"date":"2026-09-18T11:06:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T11:06:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/896458\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T11:06:19","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T11:06:19","slug":"wallabies-coach-les-kiss-take-your-eye-off-us-well-come-back-and-bite-you-australia-rugby-union-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/896458\/","title":{"rendered":"Wallabies coach Les Kiss: \u2018Take your eye off us, we\u2019ll come back and bite you\u2019 | Australia rugby union team"},"content":{"rendered":"

Top dogs at Rugby Australia HQ are generally suited and booted but Les Kiss, with his goatee and spectacles, gets about in jeans, sneakers and baseball cap. Short but spry, wiry like a yoga teacher, husky like a barfly, the Wallabies coach is about to face the biggest challenge \u2013 some say the greatest beatdown \u2013 of his professional life.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have the Springboks in front of us next Sunday,\u201d Kiss says. \u201cIt\u2019s a massive opportunity to challenge a fantastic team that is second to none in the world. An opportunity to challenge ourselves too. We won\u2019t shy away; we\u2019ll take it on. This 80 minutes will be a representation of where we\u2019re at \u2013 and who we are.\u201d<\/p>\n

The cold facts are Australia are the No 7-ranked rugby nation in the world and South Africa are No 1 by a country mile. The Springboks flew into Sydney on Wednesday after three straight victories over the All Blacks (a team Australia haven\u2019t beaten since 2020), another scary reminder that Rassie Erasmus\u2019s side are rugby\u2019s true superpower and heavy favourites for a third consecutive World Cup in 13 months\u2019 time.<\/p>\n

But Kiss is brimming with belief. He has seen a documentary about \u201cMove 32\u201d, a fabled strategic play that enabled an AI computer to defeat the greatest human mind in the game of Go. The details run deep but essentially the move turned traditional wisdom on its head, defied millennia of human instinct, and sparked an upset for the ages. \u201cWhen you\u2019re not constrained by conventions, anything is possible isn\u2019t it?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook at David Campese \u2013 unconventional, unconstrained, unpredictable. That\u2019s \u2018the Wallaby Way\u2019. The beauty of those skills is you understand the moment, you feel the game, you sense what\u2019s important now. It\u2019s a sweet spot that seems mysteriously out of reach until there\u2019s enough firepower or brain power as a group to let it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is he saying the Wallabies have a Move 32 ready for Sunday\u2019s Test? \u201cWriting that wouldn\u2019t help us, mate,\u201d he laughs. \u201cIt would make things much worse.\u201d Instead, Australian fans will have to draw inspiration from three sources: the team\u2019s unbeaten four-Test run under Kiss, the fact the men in gold scored a famous victory against the Springboks only last year, and their coach\u2019s rare close-up knowledge of Erasmus.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy first job in rugby was with South Africa and I learned rugby through the eyes of the Springboks,\u201d Kiss says of his two-year stint in 2001-02 as their defence coach. \u201cRassie was in his final year as a player then. I got to know him better when he was at Munster and I was in the Irish national set-up. As a player and a coach he\u2019s a very savvy operator. Rassie thinks of the game differently and is always true to himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wallabies coach Les Kiss at Rugby Australia headquarters in Sydney this week. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Where Kiss is a mathematician, drawing from the Sicilian defence in chess as much as his days as a rugby league winger, Erasmus is a maverick. Against New Zealand, he sprayed referees and rivals in the media, swapped his front-row an hour before kick-off and indulged in heavy gamesmanship, on field and off. It all worked.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat he\u2019s done with the national side is pretty special,\u201d says Kiss. \u201cIt\u2019s taken a lot of time to build but he\u2019s been backed, and he gets results when he needs them. Two World Cups in a row speaks to that. He\u2019s also built unbelievable depth. Let\u2019s face it: he\u2019s got four first-XVs and has quality and talent three or four deep in every position.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The Wallabies can only dream of such reserves. Kiss is doing his best to pump game time and Kiss culture into every Wallaby wannabe, but for all the weapons out wide, he remains hamstrung by injuries to his playmakers. His unbeaten run so far is partly down to rips from the Erasmus playbook, flipping sides match-by-match, endorsing enforcers, unleashing bomb squads off the bench, all to create depth and diversity.<\/p>\n

Two-time World Cup midfielder and one-time prodigy Jordan Petaia is the latest, recalled after stints in the NFL and club rugby in France to apply pressure on golden boy Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii whose lightning remains frustratingly bottled at No 13.<\/p>\n

However, he resisted the temptation to recall veteran flyhalf James O\u2019Connor, who masterminded the Wallabies\u2019 freakish comeback victory in Johannesburg last year.<\/p>\n

Kiss draws inspiration from that historic boilover to dream of another next weekend. \u201cThe big thing in that game was that the Wallabies never looked beaten, even when the scoreline was not good [22-0 after 18 minutes]. They kept coming. That belief and resilience is incredibly strong in this squad and it\u2019s evolving every Test. We\u2019ve got work to do but take your eye off us, we\u2019ll come back and bite you.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Top dogs at Rugby Australia HQ are generally suited and booted but Les Kiss, with his goatee and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":896459,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-896458","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\/896458","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=896458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/896459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=896458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=896458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=896458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}