in a draw, with Wallabies utility Reece Hodge narrowly missing a long-range penalty that would have sealed the game for the visitors in Wellington.
While the All Blacks scored comfortable wins in the second and third games of the series, the Wallabies came back strongly to win the final battle between the two sides of 2020, prevailing 24-22 in Queensland.
Lienert-Brown suggested that he and his teammates took some important lessons from the matches where they struggled for ascendancy and they won’t again be caught by surprise by the men from Australia.
“Every time you play, you take lessons, whether you lose or you win,” he said. “If we think back to the first Bledisloe game last year, they definitely turned up. We’ll take our learnings from that and implement it into this week. Obviously they’ll be confident because they won the series with France and they played pretty well. We know they’re going to be physical and they’re going to want to outwork us so there’s not a lot of things that are going to surprise us, but we know that they’re going to be up for this game and we’ve got to match them physically.”
Retallick was on sabbatical last year and missed the entirety of the test season but the July tests have provided him and the rest of the All Blacks with plenty of insight as to how the Wallabies are continuing to develop their game under Dave Rennie – the man who first selected Lienert-Brown and Retallick for the Chiefs.
“I’ve only seen what they did against the French a few weeks back,” he admitted, “and obviously they had some big forward ball-carriers coming around the corner and then they’ve got some backs that like to run across the line and pick a defender and try and make a decision.
“They’re a good outfit. They’re no doubt going to come at us up front with those forwards like we talked about and I suppose that’s the challenge for us that we don’t get caught out by what they bring like we maybe did against Fiji down in Dunedin.”
