Paul Cully

If you look beyond the final Rugby Championship standings, Joe Schmidt’s side has achieved several big ticks. It’s not immediately obvious how they accommodate the big-money code-hopper.

The All Blacks have some major issues, but Australia’s poor start meant they couldn’t take advantage.

New Zealand do not like people getting up in their faces, and their occasional inability to deal with overt aggression has been a recurring feature in their losses since 2017.

An intriguing statistic from New Zealand’s four Rugby Championship Tests points to a chink in their armour the Wallabies can expose in Saturday’s Bledisloe Cup Test in Sydney.

Coaches love to talk about attacking structure, but there is no substitute for a player who can make things happen out of nothing. Against Argentina, the Wallabies had just one of those.

The implosion of the once-invincible All Blacks has Wallabies fans passing the popcorn and dreaming of a Bledisloe upset.

It was always going to be hard to gauge the Wallabies in two Tests against the Springboks. But “work in progress” signs can’t stay up forever.

Two Tests against the Springboks, with players who compete against European competition, will gauge the quality of trans-Tasman rugby.

The NRL’s best player has just over 400,000 followers on Instagram. For Ilona Maher, a USA women’s sevens star, that number is 2.5 million. It says much about the social and sporting landscape.

Painfully modest as it sounds, a realistic aim for Australia would be to finish sixth in the world rankings, ahead of Scotland, Argentina and the increasingly solid Fiji.