Rosario: The Wallabies are a team in need of a Tucuman.
Not a shamanistic totem strung up in the team room, as a Tucuman might be mistaken for, but a game or a moment, a rallying call when 15 tired and battered men find themselves under the pump.
'This might be it, this might be the game, we might play really well in a very foreign, difficult environment and use it as a reference point in future,' Wallabies coach Ewen McKenzie says with irrepressible optimism of Sunday's Test against Argentina in Rosario.
'We did that in the [Rod] Macqueen era [when McKenzie was an assistant coach]. There was always a game you'd say, 'Well that was the game it came together' and you only had to say the name of the game to make something happen.'
Advertisement
McKenzie still remembers his Tucuman - the first - 22 years later. It was the Waratahs' undefeated 1991 season, when the team toured Argentina. They played the country's top club side, from San Miguel de Tucuman, in in a blistering encounter that was finally settled with a draw.
'It was a ferocious game, here on their home patch, and they hadn't lost for years,' McKenzie recalls. 'We drew, but there were things that happened in that game … You only had to say the word and memories flooded back. We used the 'Tucuman' call after that.'
McKenzie's Wallabies need a few more wins to find their Tucuman. A one-point win in Perth three weeks ago was a show of grit but not the turning point they're searching for. The other four games since McKenzie replaced Robbie Deans as coach in July, all losses, threw up more questions than sign posts. It's one step forward, two back, then one frustrating shuffle to the side.
'You have to know what winning looks like,' McKenzie says. 'It doesn't matter if it was Randwick in the old days or Toulouse or the All Blacks, their mindset is that they have to win. They don't entertain the idea of coming second, and from that, everyone's empowered.
'That's the thing that's been the biggest challenge. You can talk and cajole but they have to get it, know what it looks like. They have to feel it first.'
The new Wallabies coach is pondering the bigger picture in downtown Rosario. It is not the one he expected.
'To be honest, I didn't come in thinking it was going be like this at all. I came in with high expectations,' he says. 'That's all very well when you're looking in from outside, but you get in here and you find what you find.'
Australia's depth issues are well known, but McKenzie found himself losing players left, right and centre in the first few weeks: Tatafu Polota-Nau, Hugh McMeniman, Wycliff Palu, Nick Cummins, Jesse Mogg and most recently, for entirely different reasons, James O'Connor.
At the same time, he decided to eschew the experience of some Test players in favour of blooding a new generation. It was a tough ask, and before long Sitaleki Timani was brought in before Benn Robinson was invited to tour for the final two Tests.
'If anything, we were guilty of backing some young blood there and expecting guys with no caps to come on and finish a game against the All Blacks. That was a little bit ambitious,' he says.
'But, by the same token, I still think we've identified really good players for the next few years. We could have just sat down and run what was there [after the British and Irish Lions series], but there's no point.
'I've been employed to try to take things forward. In an ideal world, you go forwards to go forwards but in the end sometimes it doesn't happen the way you want.'
No it doesn't. There is no escaping the fact that for a long time under Deans, McKenzie was the popular alternative choice and he was happy to be cast in that role. After signalling his intention to leave the Reds and aim for a Test coaching job, he gave a number of interviews in which he said he had a few ideas about how to beat the All Blacks.
Which is not to say he doesn't. But the Wallabies first two attempts this year were huge disappointments, heightened by the hope and confidence that McKenzie's bullishness had inspired in the hearts of Australian rugby fans.
He won't apologise for that, mostly because he still believes it can be done by this group.
'I thought by now we'd have the Bledisloe Cup, and I'm always going to think like that,' he says.
'People say I'm a pessimist but I'm optimistic. When I came in and looked at the players we've got, I knew we didn't have experience in a lot of positions but I still think we've got good players, so I'll never concede defeat on that. I've just got to find a way to overcome their lack of experience but then use their enthusiasm.'
McKenzie won't concede defeat on running rugby, either. Despite consecutive drubbings at the hands of the All Blacks, threats of 'dumbing down' the Wallabies' game plan and enough unforced errors to make a first XV coach cry, he is sticking fast to the fundamentals.
'We'll keep running the ball and invest in that,' he says. 'We still want to out-work our opponents and out-manoeuvre them, we're not moving away from that at all. It's the 20 per cent where you work out which bit of the field you're going to do that in, and we've adjusted that a little bit.'
Beyond the details, the day-to-day minutiae that fills a coach and a team's life together, lies the Wallabies' Tucuman.
The second half against South Africa in Cape Town last week offered a glimmer of hope in the midst of as ugly a start to a season as the Wallabies have had in recent times.
And while the rest of Australia might readily swap a third Bledisloe Test for a good lie down at this point, McKenzie sees another chance to chase that defining moment.
'We've had 10 or 11 years of mixed footy, where we've had good results here and there and we've had things we wish didn't happen,' he says.
'We've had a month and a half [together] and it's not great and I'm not
enjoying it at all. But I am very confident that we'll get an outcome, because
I'm a fixer. I'll find
