New Zealand supremo Dave Rennie summed it all up perfectly after his charges had lowered the boom on Australia for the second time in two weeks. While the Wallabies have shown some stirrings of life in their first seven games under new head coach Les Kiss, right now they look like a poor man’s edition of the All Blacks.

“There’s no point playing this way and then going to a World Cup and trying to play risk-free footy,” Rennie said.

“We’re well aware you can put yourself under pressure the way that we’re trying to play, but we’ll also back ourselves that we’ll profit more than we’ll suffer in those situations.

“I don’t think you want all the teams in the world playing the same game.

“If you look at the Wallabies, they’re pretty similar to us. They’ll want to play, and it’s a point of difference, part of the DNA of both sides.”

How can the Wallabies ever escape the shadow of their big Super Rugby brother across the Tasman if they are trying to play the game the same way, but with slightly less efficiency and conviction?

New Zealand won 43-21 at the Accor stadium in Sydney, scoring 14 tries and 93 points over two matches, and the double-header confirmed the feeling we’re not in Johannesburg or Cape Town anymore. High-octane attacking rugby has planted its flag deep in the earth of the game, and it is here to stay – but Kiss’ Wallabies will not win too many shootouts against Rennie’s All Blacks.

The answer may be as simple as dusting off Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant’s famous old maxim that ‘offense wins games, but defence wins championships’. Defence coaches can no longer guarantee to staunch the flow of blood at 25, or even 30 points per game, but excellence on the defensive side of the ball still does count. It was, after all, one of the primary planks in the green-and-gold’s two World Cup triumphs in 1991 and 1999.

Kiss first cut his coaching teeth as a defensive assistant to open-minded Durbanite Harry Viljoen with the Springboks back in 2001. He was one of the first coaches to migrate in the great rugby crossover from league, and he forged a high-pressure, blitz-based template which only gave up three tries at the 2001 Tri-Nations. When he was first appointed to succeed Joe Schmidt as head coach of Australia, most observers expected him to bring an extra edge to the team’s defence.

Supporters would have been encouraged by the comments of the man himself upon his arrival in the job.

“We want to make sure we make [defence] a weapon for us, so we can attack with it,” Kiss said. “[If] we can ignite that part of the game even further, and create that type of pressure and turnovers, we’ve got some handy players who can do something with it in those situations.”

So far, so good. In late March, Scott McLeod, the ex-All Blacks defence coach of almost 90 Tests, was announced as Kiss’ new assistant. McLeod’s main claim to fame was devising the scheme which so frustrated Ireland at the 2023 World Cup, a quarter-final where the All Blacks soaked up 276 tackles while conceding a miserly 24 points.

For Rugby Australia director of high performance Peter Horne, this was a positive sign of continuity between the two regimes: “Scott has a great understanding of the environment and standards Joe Schmidt has driven since joining the Wallabies, having coached alongside him with the All Blacks, and will provide great support to Les as he transitions into the head coach position.” With Kiss will looking to “have a handle over the attack space”, the new division of responsibilities was clear, and it appeared Wallaby supporters would no longer have to endure the scourge of Christmases past.

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) March 2, 2026

Throughout Schmidt’s time in charge, the Wallabies clung on to an old-fashioned 12/1/2 defensive system: 12 men in the line, two in the backfield with the scrum-half defending in the zone between the two. The system emphasised connectedness between defenders at the cost of aggression, with two backfield defenders standing deep, and a front line drifting across to link up with them as play tracked towards the far sideline. The scrum-half would fill the space in between, to plug gaps and pick up any short kicks through.

The problems with the triple-layered defence were twofold: the soft shoulders and big spacings it offered up front, and the risk of the scrum-half getting bypassed in that no-man’s-land in between the two lines of D. It was would be an exaggeration to say McLeod has changed the system very much, if at all from the Schmidt era. Over the two Bledisloe Cup matches, Australia conceded a massive 24 clean breaks, 23 offloads and 66 defenders beaten, while only winning four turnovers at the breakdown among the 229 rucks built by the All Blacks.

The old 12/1/2 is still in operation, and the defensive number nine is hedging his bets and playing in between the two lines. When aggression occurs, it tends to start on the edge, with isolated tacklers ‘spotting’ attackers off a drift towards the far sideline.

Let’s look at some examples of how the scrum-half is deployed first. Brumby Ryan Lonergan defends from the boot space just behind the ruck, dropping in and out of the front line to an area 10 metres deeper.

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) October 17, 2026

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) October 17, 2026

In both of these clips, Lonergan is defending about 10-15m behind the front line when the two breaks by Damian McKenzie, then Wallace Sititi are made. And in both cases, when subsequent play enters the Wallaby 22, there are still two defenders in a shallow backfield, with Lonergan still shuttling between the two lines at 10:12-10:36 in the first example, and 30:25 in the second. Especially within your own red zone, only 12 men in the line gives every defender an awful lot of real estate to cover, and the All Blacks happily plunder the gaps.

On occasion, Lonergan was caught leaving the line at the very spot where they break was made, the same place he would have been defending had he stayed put.

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) October 17, 2026

The second issue orbited around Wallaby spot blitzing off the edge.

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) October 17, 2026

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) October 17, 2026

The pitfall in both clips is associated with one defender blitzing when the rest of the line is drifting towards the far touchline. One defender shoots out but the rest of the defence is in no position to adjust if he misses. Even when he sticks his man, the attack can continue with no loss of momentum because everyone else is passive.

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) October 17, 2026

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) October 17, 2026

In the first clip, Harry Potter shoots out with some vim and vigour to make the stop on Rieko Ioane, but Timoci Tavatanawai is able to regenerate the attack on the next phase of play, before the All Blacks go back to work on Lonergan, treading water between the two lines of defence.

Defensive coaches everywhere are taking a deep breath, looking around the next corner and shooting nervous glances behind them. Collectively, they are wiping their feet at the door and anticipating a tough day at the office, as scorelines inevitably mount with every new change in the law.

McLeod is no exception, and he will be feeling the heat. If there is one aspect of Australian performance which has not improved under Kiss, it is the area where he first started coaching international rugby. The Wallabies are neither well connected, nor do they deliver great line speed. They don’t soak up pressure and they don’t create turnovers. There is blood in the water and the sharks are already circling.