Re the decision not to play warm up games, it’s a gamble either way in my book. The Wallabies are notoriously slow starters to the test season and there is every chance we will be underdone. Although to be fair we generally look underdone due to having less than a week to prepare and work on combinations. I don’t think physicality or fitness will be a problem given that the guys have comes from playing 3 months of top flight provincial rugby. It’s the combinations that are the question mark. But they have been doing nothing else but running set plays and patterns over the last three weeks so in that respect it doesn’t really compare to other pre-season games over the last few years.
I think you’ll find that when the Super season resumes, some teams will look rusty, whilst others will hit the ground running, looking reinvigorated. Hopefully the Wallabies will be the latter. After what has been a fairly taxing super season, this break is really a great opportunity to recharge the battery. No doubt the super season takes its toll; one only has to look at the waxing and waning fortunes of some of the teams to see that the form of certain players take a dive after too many consecutive weeks of rugby.
The real reason behind the decision is surely to protect (as best possible) against pre-series’ injuries to our squad. One only has to remember 2010 when we lost Alexander (against Fiji) in the week leading up to the England Series, after having already lost Robbo during the super season. It was an injury that the Wallabies couldn’t cover for and resulted in 2 penalty tries the next week. In all honestly the Wallabies are precariously placed in terms of squad depth. We can perhaps cope with the early losses of pocock, smith, TPN, Timani and Higgers. However the loss of a Genia, Moore, Horwill, Robinson, AAC (Adam Ashley-Cooper), Palu, etc so close to the first test would have been a disaster of biblical proportions. We may very well lose one or two anyway during the test series, but it is important that we have a full arsenal for the first test.