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 – some say the greatest beatdown – of his professional life. An opportunity to challenge ourselves too.
We won’t shy away; we’ll take it on. This 80 minutes will be a representation of where we’re at – and who we are.” 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’t beaten since 2020), another scary reminder that Rassie Erasmus’s side are rugby’s true superpower and heavy favourites for a third consecutive World Cup in 13 months’ time.
But Kiss is brimming with belief. He has seen a documentary about “Move 32”, 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.
That’s ‘the Wallaby Way’. The beauty of those skills is you understand the moment, you feel the game, you sense what’s important now. It’s a sweet spot that seems mysteriously out of reach until there’s enough firepower or brain power as a group to let it happen.” Is he saying the Wallabies have a Move 32 ready for Sunday’s Test?
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’s a very savvy operator. Rassie thinks of the game differently and is always true to himself.” 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. Two World Cups in a row speaks to that. He’s also built unbelievable depth.
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